Archive of Agile Articles

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation, and it values customer collaboration over contract negotiation.  With that in mind, how much is a picture of a model worth?  Check out a simple example, how it helped, and what we didn’t do.

Satisficing probably makes more sense than perfecting your product.

Can?  Open.

Worms?  Everywhere.

Are we really saying “don’t make it perfect?”  Yup.

Planning by ROI.  Hmmm.  Isn’t that impractical?  In an econometric way, yes.  But you can still estimate the relative value of the capabilities / stories you’re planning for your scrum sprints.  The point is – don’t look only at value – also look at costs.  While “ROI” may be a poor choice of terms, “bang for the buck” is not.

You’ve got a giant backlog of user stories and product capabilities.  How do you determine which stories to implement right now?  By the estimated value of each story?  Pick the ones the developers want to build next?  How about picking the stories that maximize the ROI of the sprint?  To do that, you need to estimate both value and cost.  While remaining agile.

Agile development methodologies succeed because they help development teams be as effective as possible.  Development teams do not, however, work in complete isolation.  The company they work for has a strategy.  The company manages a portfolio of products, and targets a particular product at specific market problems.  Within that context, an agile team can thrive.  What’s the best way to provide that context?

Your strategy should be driven by the needs of the market.  Becoming market-driven is critical to intentional product success.  But it is not enough to understand your market.  You have to sustain your understanding, and take advantage of it, competitively.

Adam Bullied wrote a really good article about not losing motivation in the face of challenges. His closing quote spun us off on a philosophical tangent about being “good enough.”

Is your product successful because you were lucky, or because you were methodical and intentional?

Do you want to build a plan where you are dependent on good fortune, or do you want to make your own “luck?” Both approaches work, but only one makes sense as an intention. Slide 3 of your presentation to a venture capitalist should not say “And then we get lucky!”

Instead of

Prioritize the present when planning your product. Neglecting the future is almost as bad as over-emphasizing it. The key is to incorporate your plans for the future correctly by making them play second fiddle to the present needs of your market. Serve both today and tomorrow – but prioritize today.

We’ve been promoting use cases as the right way to approach agile requirements, and in a recent article, Alistair Cockburn stresses the importance of use cases. Over the last three years, he has found that teams that avoid use cases consistently run into the same three problems. We defer, of course, to Alistair as the expert. But we’ve been independently promoting this practice too. So today, we get a cookie!