Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged business
Agile software development, the principles. Principle 4: Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Dec 19th
This is the fourth of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.
The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.
Principle 4: Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Strange, shouldn’t this be common practice? In my daily work I meet lots of developers that have never had any contact with business people. The only notice of the business they get is the constant feed of PowerPoint presentations. When they are lucky the presentations contain hard to understand schemas, “roadmaps” and high level (or extremely detailed) business requirements.
This 4th principle tries to overcome the communication and cultural differences between ICT and business. It recognizes that there are significant differences in culture and jargon between these two groups. By putting them together on a daily basis they get used to each other and they develop a common understanding of the goal of the project.
Working together on a daily basis must actually mean working together! So this does not mean a daily short meeting after witch the two teams retreat to their own project room.
Agile software development, the principles. Principle 1: Deliver valuable software
Jun 8th
This is the first of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development.
Purpose of this, and the upcoming 11 posts, is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering.
Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.
The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story?.
Principle 1: Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
The discussion here is of course "what is valuable software?".
Opinions differ between stakeholders of the project. From a developer perspective valuable software is nice designed with all OO principles of encapsulation, inheritance and abstraction. From the end-user perspective valuable software is a rich, customizable user interface and loads and loads of features that make the daily work easier. The support department sees valuable software as easy to install, configure, manage and cost effective in maintenance. The business owner just wants an effective TCO value in relation to the business value. To get an answer to this question you have to get back to the business case of the project. The business case sets the GOALS of the project against to the costs of creating the deliverables to reach the goal. The Software is just one (in many cases the most important) of the deliverables of the project and the customer uses the deliverable to reach the goal.
