Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Do What’s Needed—And No More

“Don’t build a limousine if all your customer wants is a bicycle!” This is a refrain I use over and over and over with teams I work with. We engineers love our own ideas about how to “improve” something, and these ideas often make it into the product. However, quite frequently, many of these “really neat ideas” wind up being just a waste. Do your customers use all those additional things that were put into the product? Do they even want all that additional functionality? Maybe you think it’s cool, or that it’s really needed, but do they? Perhaps this explains why, in a Standish Group survey, 64 percent of a typical software product’s features were rarely or never used.⁶

6. Source: Standish Group, CHAOS Chronicles ...