Agile and Documentation-Driven-Development can not only easily go hand in hand, I think agile is perfectly suited to work like this.
We figure out what the software is supposed to do -> We write documentation describing that -> We build the implementation -> New Requirements -> Figure out how to incorporate them into the plan -> Update the documentation -> Build the changes.
It's an iterative process, perfectly suited to agile development.
I would assume that an agile process will rely on Markdown, but then it some point does it get (irreversibly) committed to a more conventional document format.
If assume (please correct me if I'm wrong) by "conventional document format" you mean ones that do not play well with version control software like git (eg. because they may be/contain huge binary blobs), yes?
If so, at least in the projects I am involved in, all documentation that is checked into the repos remains in markdown (asciidoc is also used alot), and is only converted to non-plaintext formats for the purposes of release.
This is similar to how we build executables from our source code, but don't check in the resulting binary files into the repo.
Yes, by "conventional document format" I meant something in the Microsoft crapiverse.
Keeping it in markdown/asciidoc sounds great if you can make it work. Is your work in technical environments ? Where people have no expectation of using MS Word ? And those users that need fancy features like footnotes can learn how to use them and then retain that knowledge and use the features without inadvertantly document damage ?
I ask because I worked TC in a software firm targeting Microsoft platforms, so they relied on Word (and Sharepoint), and were resistant to ideas of XML and structured documentation, and Markdown never even raised its head.
We figure out what the software is supposed to do -> We write documentation describing that -> We build the implementation -> New Requirements -> Figure out how to incorporate them into the plan -> Update the documentation -> Build the changes.
It's an iterative process, perfectly suited to agile development.