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Why do Extreme Programming practitioners keep requirements on index cards?

Because when you rip a card to shreds, or go through a whole pack when you thought you had a small project, that gives you information about what's going on in the project that's a lot more difficult to ignore than just adding or removing lines in a spreadsheet.

Computers make it easy to keep track of the information, but they make it equally easy to make the information obscure and meaningless, or prevent key members of the project community from gaining access to the information - without them being even aware that they're denied access. The physicality of index cards is a good antidote to that. Index cards are the symbol of a different contract regarding the sharing of project information.

That's only one reason...