Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

High Value First

Agile emphasizes delivering high-value functionality to customers. This essentially means that teams need to build the most critical functionality first and get it to their customers. Both evolutionary product design and do just enough thinking overlap and are both complementary with high value first. To demonstrate this, return to the notion of a backlog of prioritized user stories for a release. A backlog of user stories provides a powerful tool to deliver high value first, do just enough, and to allow the design to evolve as you progress because a rank-ordered list of user stories enables teams to complete successive functionality in order of importance to the user. Well-written user stories will each describe a small problem ...