AGILE IN ACTION

I had to laugh today when a colleague, shaking his head in exasperation following a business priority corridor conversation, distilled the basic forces of software development down into a single statement:

At Agile 2008, Luke Hohmann from Enthiosys talked about converting business value into actual money. Luke said prioritizing the backlog by ROI doesn't work and suggested developing attributes for backlog prioritization that drive profitable growth. In terms of what we've been doing at one of our clients using throughput accounting this means increasing revenue without significantly increasing investment and decreasing costs without impacting throughput (or the capacity to deliver).

Joe Little's session was interesting. Basically, you need to define what business value is for your product and that definition may evolve over time.

Short posts with deep wisdom from Jason Yip: Over-specialisation leads to over-sized teams . Over-specialisation means that there is no small team that has enough knowledge to accomplish any project. Prioritise to maintain options . Every feature implemented before its time removes an option to defer that feature to protect schedule. Customers aren't disappointed when you don't meet your commitments ; they're disappointed when it means they can't meet theirs.