The Art of Agile Development

Exploit Your Agility

Simplicity of code and process are aesthetically pleasing. Yet there’s a more important reason why agility helps you create great software: it improves your ability to recognize and take advantage of new opportunities.

If you could predict to the hour how long your project would take, know what risks would and wouldn’t happen, and completely eliminate all surprises, you wouldn’t need agility—you would succeed with any development method.

However, what you don’t know is exciting. A new crisis or happy discovery next week could completely change the rules of the game. You may discover a brilliant new technique that simplifies your code, or your customer may develop a new business practice that saves time and money.

Want to deliver real value? Take advantage of what you’ve learned and change your direction appropriately. Adapting your point of view to welcome changing requirements gives you great opportunities. Delivering value to your customer is your most important job. Aggressively pursuing feedback from your customer, from real users, from other team members, and from your code itself as early and as often as possible allows you to continue to learn and improve your understanding of the project. It also reveals new opportunities as they appear.

Agility requires you to work in small steps, not giant leaps. A small initial investment of time and resources, properly applied, begins producing quantifiable value immediately. As well, committing to small amounts of change ...