The Art of Agile Development

Deliver Business Results

What if you could best meet your customer’s need without writing any software? Would you do it? Could you do it?

Someday that may happen to you. It may not be as dramatic as telling a recurring customer that he’ll get better results if you don’t write software, but you may have to choose between delivering code and delivering business results.

Value isn’t really about software, after all. Your goal is to deliver something useful for the customer. The software is merely how you do that. The single most essential criterion for your success is the fitness of the project for its business purposes. Everything else is secondary—not useless by any means, but of lesser importance.

For example, agile teams value working software over comprehensive documentation. Documentation is valuable—communicating what the software must do and how it works is important—but your first priority is to meet your customer’s needs. Sometimes that means producing good documentation. Usually it means delivering good software, but not always. The primary goal is always to provide the most valuable business results possible.

In Practice

XP encourages close involvement with actual customers by bringing them into the team, so they can measure progress and make decisions based on business value every day. Real customer involvement allows the on-site customer to review these values with end-users and keep the plan on track. Their vision provides answers to the questions most important to the project. ...