Monday
Jan032011
Agile Principle 2: Changing Requirements
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 15:13 | in Agile, Productivity, Project management, Scrum This is the second post in the series of 12 posts about Agile Manifesto Principles. They are the foundation of all agile methodologies and every Scrum team member should be familiar with them.
Here is the second principle, that talks about change:
Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.
In software development we all strive for a projects where customer would never change their minds. And we all know that will never happen because changes are inevitable in real world. Customers usually do not see a problem of changing requirements as a serious one.
Traditional development process prefers sticking to their well-thought-out plans that are the result of the requirement-gathering phase. Introducing change late in the development process is costly because you need to repeat the whole waterfall process (analyse, design,...) for each change.
Agile methods take a different approach and treat change as an expected and welcome part of every project. After all, it is all about satisfying the customer because it is necessary to preserve customer's competitive advantage.
During the project the customer can continue to make changes, as long as they prioritize these changes in the appropriate iteration. Product owner is responsible for understanding of the customer needs and grooming the product backlog (prioritizing work based on business value) even near the end of the project. It is even better to make decisions later in the process when we have a better understanding of the product that we are building. Because a product backlog is a living thing that evolve constantly it can respond to the actions of customer's competitors. Agility is all about flexibility and being open to change is a big advantage.
You need to remember the following two words about this principle: welcome (changing requirements) and harness (change)!
You can find the explanation of the first principle here.
Reader Comments