Kai Ramuenke

If you ask ten people for what Agile is about, you will probably get ten different answers. In this post i don’t want to create my own definition but instead discuss two basic drivers for doing Agile.

A common response i get to this question is: Agile will make us deliver faster. Though possibly true if you are a mature Agile organization i don’t think this is what Agile is about in the first place. Is going fast really what you’re after?

In my opinion the most basic driver is to generate business value as early as possible by delivering working software. This is different from just going fast as you can deliver quickly but not the right thing to produce value. Generating early business value is only possible if the team works on the most important things first. It requires high involvement from the business and continuous collaboration throughout the project to make sure the team generates value. Apparently this is often neglected by traditional organizations through their functional structure and thinking in silos.

Another basic driver for Agile is removing pain points and obstacles in the delivery process. This driver is highly influenced by Lean thinking. You look at your delivery process and ask the question: What is our biggest problem in delivering high quality, working software. You identify the biggest problem, look at the root cause, fix it and look for the next biggest problem. You do this continuously and you actually will go faster as you are removing your obstacles step by step. Typical examples for pain points and obstacles are functional teams rather than cross-functional teams, manual testing rather than automated testing or communication through documentation rather than face-to-face communication and finding placeholders for conversation.

Having these basic drivers is great but there is a tension between these two drivers. If you only go for business value you will end up with heaps of technical debt. Technical debt can be generated by a change of direction to tackle the most important things first. Or by the simple fact that the team gains more and more knowledge about the system and domain from iteration to iteration. Technical debt also tends to have a high interest rate and the longer you wait to remove technical debt the higher the interest rate will get. On the other hand if you concentrate your effort purely on removing technical debt you will lose focus on business value or won’t deliver business value at all.

Hence the trick is to find the right balance between the two drivers when you plan your iterations. Deliver business value but also allocate time to tackle your biggest problem. I can’t really tell you the right balance but if you are new to Agile i would recommend to favor removing your biggest problem over delivering business value as it will have a long term effect on your overall delivery.

Tags: Basics

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Agile Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.