…very agile if all of your stakeholders do not have the information they need in the most efficient form they need it and at the time they need it. Look, I don’t pretend to be an Agile guru. I am not that enamored of the mythology that Agile is something new or even exciting. To me it is just seems like a set of mini-waterfalls no matter what all the gurus say.
Yes, it is good to control the scope of your releases based on the number of requirements you have. And it good to ensure that you don’t take 10 years to bring a product to market. It is not possible to envision a product that has a 1000 requirements will be designed, developed and delivered in a month if all you have are 3 developers. That only makes sense
Don’t Hang Your Supporting Contributors Out to Dry
But the problem is in my experience, most places I have work have the tendency to define and deliver an Agile project, with a bare bones exchange of information…a few wireframes at best with the expectation that you grill the developer for more information.
Well, the developer is busy cutting your product. And, by the way, he is not cheap. Do you want to interrupt the “assembly line” with questions and answers that are free form and have no structure? After all, without the code being cut you have no product. Leave the poor guy alone and let him do his job. But, make sure that what work he is doing is captured effectively in useable documentation that meets the other stakeholder’s needs.
Know What Your Stakeholders Need Don’t Just Guess
You have junior developers, quality assurance engineers, training developers, sales and marketing people who need to build literature in a timely fashion. Know exactly what they need to do the job. Don’t just assume that just a few sketches on page are enough just because it seem “agile” (little “a.”) No, it is not agile, it is just looks cheap. It certainly is not cost effective in the long run. And you get what you pay for.
Besides if you are delivering Class II or Class III to the FDA, they want to see more than a few stick figures with a few balloons especially if your product had the ability to do serious harm if it malfunctions.
