Careful with that brain, Igor!

So - you have invested in transforming to an agile development process. Your teams have honed their processes until it runs like clockwork, and are resilient to changing needs. Software is being produced cleanly and efficiently with minimal fuss.

But there is still something missing. The software simply doesn’t do what you expect. The customers don’t like it, and won’t use it. It has annoying quirks and foibles that put people off. It simply isn’t right. What’s going on?

Congratulations! You have discovered the Achilles Heel of all software development. It has to have an undamaged brain. A well disciplined agile team will deliver whatever its business brain asks of it. The team is only as good as its inputs and subsequent feedback on its deliveries.

Or to put it another way, so-called ‘agile’, and all other software delivery processes for that matter, rely on sound business thinking. Make Abby Normal your customer/Product Owner, and you will be in serious trouble.

At its heart, agility is about delivering a product iteratively, delivering a small slice of value for validation, and getting feedback whether it is right, allowing corrective action as needed as lessons are learned. This means that for software delivery to succeed, business - however you define it; customer/product owner/whatever - must engage fully. This includes providing a definitive product vision to the team, prioritising what needs to be delivered next, and making decisions based on the results of each iteration. Throwing away work is perfectly valid, and can be beneficial. Break this feedback control loop and it will not work, no matter how good the team is.

By treating projects as a series of small, iterative gambles, the business becomes far more likely to succeed in delivering what it intends. The business, as well as the team providing the raw development talent, needs to be agile in its thinking. If it’s not, then you run the risk of putting an abnormal brain into a seven and a half foot long, fifty four inch wide gorilla....

Don’t be an Igor.