Posts

Keep change affordable: Short iterations and small stories: Reduce the blast radius of any decision. Continuous integration and delivery: Keep the product always releasable so swapping scope is easy. Automated tests and refactoring: Make code safe to change; the test suite proves we didn’t break value already delivered. Modular architecture and clear seams: Localize change instead of rewriting the world. Feature flags and branch-by-abstraction: Enable gradual rollouts and safe reversals. Backlog hygiene and ROI-driven ordering: Replace lower-ROI work with higher-ROI work at minimal switching cost. WIP limits: Less inventory in flight means less rework when priorities shift.

Software is meant to change. Customers have the right to change their minds, substitute functionality, and re-order priorities without paying exorbitant costs. Agile assumes change and designs both the product and the process to make change economically reasonable. What “reasonable, not exorbitant” means: Change isn’t free; it should be cheap enough to make good business sense. Costs are kept low by technical excellence and small-batch planning, not by refusing change.

The customers have the right to expect that builders tackle the most important work each cycle and deliver maximum usable business value. They choose the stories with the highest return on investment that fit the builders’ estimates during planning. Customers also have the right to see progress in a running system, not just slide decks or status reports. They specify the acceptance criteria, and a suite of repeatable tests prove that the criteria is met. ...

Scope Soft or Dates Soft Myth: agile software development skips planning. Wrong! Customers have the right to a plan - what can be done, when, and at what cost. The business needs this to function. But! being both accurate and precise requires actually building the project. Anything less is guesswork. So builders must describe uncertainty honestly using probability curves. We can’t promise fixed scope on hard dates, either scope or dates must flex. So instead we provide some kind of probability predicting estimations: “95% confidence we finish the first ten stories by the date, 50% for the next five, 5% for the five after that.” And these numbers change continually shift as each days go by. Sometimes the the schedule is very precise and at other times it’s somewhat soft. ...

The “customer” isn’t just the person clicking buttons. Generally, the “customer” label can be assigned to anyone with skin in the game — end users, managers, executives, project leaders, and anyone carrying responsibility for scheduling, budgets, and outcomes. Why does this matter? Because all of these people have legitimate overlapping needs and rights. Which might include: The project manager needs a plan. The executive needs cost visibility. The end user needs working features. The product owner needs priority control. When we treat only one group as “the customer,” other voices get ignored and trust breaks down. ...