I've asked a very similar question few days ago, but because I presented too much of my company's current situation, most answers focused completely on something that I wasn't looking to answer. So I wanted to try again...
Given just about any agile team, you always have people with varied a) knowledge of the product b) experience in producing designs and c) general level of competence.
So let's say you take an agile team and using the factors (a), (b) and (c) above you come up with an overall score for each engineers (mental exercise only). Now we sort them in ascending order and get a continuous spectrum.
So the question I wanted to ask is this: Should every single person on this spectrum be given equal responsibility as it comes to writing/updating software design specifications?
I'm not talking about coming up with software design, in agile teams that is usually done by more than one person in a more collaborative setting. But at the end of the day, someone has to go back to his desk open their favorite (and company/team approved) document editor and type it all in.
The reason I ask this question is because it seems people on high end of the spectrum tend to produce documents which are more readable, concise but have exactly the information you would want in a design specification so that future people who read it have much more benefit. People on the opposite side of the spectrum tend to produce documents which are not nearly as useful or clear and a lot of times, even with several iterations of design reviews, their work doesn't seem nearly as helpful (so specs they produce become write only dumping ground that no one reads or trusts because of the way they are written).
I'm not proposing that the agile team be segregated and only certain individuals given certain roles that will never change. I'm asking... 1) what do you do in your teams with people who have vastly different (a)x(b)x(c) scores 2) Does it make sense to not give equal responsibility to everyone. Instead, give only smaller (or none) update tasks to those on the low end of the spectrum. But then work with these individuals by identifying (a), (b) and (c) factors that they'd need to improve and as those get improved give them more responsibility.
Personally, I'm not sold on one way or another, I'm just curious how other teams are dealing with this.