The Art of Agile Development

Only Releasable Code Has Value

Having the best, most beautiful code in the world matters very little unless it does what the customer wants. It’s also true that having code that meets customer needs perfectly has little value unless the customer can actually use it. Until your software reaches the people who need it, it has only potential value.

Delivering actual value means delivering real software. Unreleasable code has no value. Working software is the primary measure of your progress. At every point, it should be possible to stop the project and have actual value proportional to your investment in producing the software.

Any functional team can change its focus in a week or a month, but can they do so while maximizing their investment of time and resources to deliver software regularly? Do they really finish code—does “done” mean “done done”—or do they leave an expanding wake of half-finished code? Do they keep their project releasable at any time?

Agility and flexibility are wonderful things, especially when combined with iterative incremental development. Throughput is important! Besides reducing thrashing and waste, it provides much better feedback, and not just in terms of the code’s quality. Only code that you can actually release to customers can provide real feedback on how well you’re providing value to your customers.

That feedback is invaluable.

In Practice

The most important practice is that of “done done,” where work is either complete or incomplete. This unambiguous measure ...