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Is Agile a Good Idea for Product Development?
July 17, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Agile Project Management
Is Agile a Good Idea for Product Development?
By Xiaoming Wang
When talking about Agile, people might say that it is a better way to develop a project or a product because with this practice, the team increasingly adds value to the users or customers. The difference between software development of a product and a project is that a project has explicit user and customer targets. Clearly Agile has advantages in facing unspecific requirements as well as eliciting requirements. In Agile, we can not tolerate business/requirement analysis based on assumption. We want to know what the users/customers really want, what their basic requirements are, and what they prefer to have. So during the software development life cycle in Agile, the customers can see the value at the very beginning and the users can help the team to improve the project.
Compared with a project from an Agile perspective, product development has two major difference. First, for a product, there are target customers and potential customers as well. Even if we can interview all the target/potential customers (which is practically impossible) we still can not have all the requirements explicitly. This makes assumption, which is usually based on Product Manager’s and the Business Analyst’s experience (maybe domain experts could contribute too), an inevitable part of product development. The other difference is that a product must be very creative from a marketing perspective. You can imagine that a product without a few new idea will never be bought by consumers except when you have offer a great price advantage.
So, is Agile the right way in software product development? The answer is YES. However, you can not follow all the rules in Agile. EXtreme Programming, pair programming, scrum, TDD also work for product development because they do not depend on requirement analysis results. Most of Agile’s advantages (such as flexibility and adaptibility) can be easily adopted by the product development team.
Bear in mind, the core spirit of a product is creativity and originality. Sometimes we have to abandon rules/policies at the cost of high risks. In this case, Risk Management should be more focused on.
Mr Xiaoming Wang, MSc (Information Processing), is a consultant, project manager, trainer, coach and business analyst in ThoughtWorks. Xiaoming has valuable experience of enterprise information system development widely across banking, finance, retail, manufacture, hydrocarbon, HSE management, telecommunication, CRM,.CMS, BPMS and grid computing. His expertise includes Agile project management, Lean methodology consulting, organization transformation from CMM to Lean/Agile, program management and business analysis. Xiaoming has worked in diverse industries for four years then settled down in IT industry as an IT manager. Then he moved to IT consulting field and focuses on IT project management. He was also a contributor to open source, such as CruiseControl.
Xiaoming’s Weblog OSSME.COM has rich information of IT project management, agile practice and lean methodology.
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