The refrain is common. "With waterfall we used to have this 300 page document you had to grok just to understand the project." With Agile that 300 page document is unnecessary.
The cliche: Not having a 300 page document is proof that the team is Agile, not waterfall. This is usually presented as an argument against documenting something. Usually a the project constraint. Software architecture is the collection of constraints placed upon the solution space. Not documenting those constraints is a bad idea.
Scrum practitioners with hundreds of backlog items will say they've given up heavy documentation. But if they ever printed the backlog they would get a document hundreds of pages long, sometimes thousands.
They are conflating the issue of whether information is useful or not with it's form of storage. In previous decades it was challenging to store documentation in small(ish) online chunks. Index and search tended to be less effective than today. The notion that scrum teams have less documentation is suspect. And this is also true of the other Agile methodologies.
Teams that develop software need to coordinate and communicate. Agile prefers face-to-face over process and tools. But Agile does not limit the types of communication. The amount of documentation is far less important than it's effectiveness.
In recent times we've benefited from online documentation tools. Still, this does not address whether a team is practicing waterfall or one of the multitude of Agile processes. It does not address whether the information is more useful. The information within a typical user story lacking in many needed details.
This is not an argument for more documentation, but rather effective documentation.
[An interesting point that often gets lost is that it's common to use the old waterfall documents as the basis for the next version. Sure, there's lots of editing and updating, but it may be better than starting from scratch. How many times have you seen the backlog for version 1 used as the starting point for version 2? Never? This is not an argument for big old waterfall documents. It's fodder for whether the documentation you do have throw away or a valued description of your prized asset.]
