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

Focus on Customer Value

The first agile principle says, “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer....”⁸ This thinking helps teams focus their efforts on delivering customer value and avoiding other activities that have resulted in waste in the past. In traditional software projects, teams created a set of product requirements based on what customers said they wanted. The requirements were described thoroughly, and typically features were fully designed and test cases were written to test every code path. What years of using this approach have taught us is that many of the features did not get used or, at best, only a few code paths of those features were used. Testing was comprehensive and often revealed many obscure issues that may or ...