Session Title

It's Your Agility that Causes Volatility

Abstract

Few Product Owners — and even fewer Developers — spend a day in the life of the end user to understand business pain points. Our solutions end up being only best guesses that miss the mark. Then we deliver something Done and our framework says to move on to the next iteration. All of this somehow passes as being agile.

In the meantime, end users face the gap between their real need and our supposed solution. This multiplies the rate at which end users supposedly generate "new requirements." Yet there is nothing new about the needs: nothing in the business has changed, but the reality of the product makes it more difficult to gloss over important questions. And we screw the users by making them pay for the changes.

Beating waterfall doesn't mean covering up poor requirements elicitation by pleading volatility, but rather carefully exploring requirements with concrete prototypes and end-user workshops (as in waterfall), as well as managing for outcomes by attending to the real use of previously delivered features. Great agile delivers less on its first delivery than perfect waterfall (where we have just the right amount of exactly the right specifications), has higher per-feature cost than perfect waterfall, but has earlier partial delivery and lower overall cost than perfect waterfall.

Bio

James "Cope" Coplien has been a programmer, professor, researcher, and executive consultant over his 45-year career. He is widely published in object-oriented design and programming language, as well as in organizational design and development process, including the seminal "Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.” Scrum’s Daily Scrum came from the research behind that book. He is the creator of Organizational Patterns and was the Product Owner of and a lead contributor to the recent "A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game,” and a peppering contributor to “97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know.” He lives with his wife, dog, and three horses in Denmark. When he grows up he wants to be an anthropologist.