Monster truck or Malibu Barbie Cruiser?

October 7th, 2007 · No Comments · Agile Practices

I was about to assemble a toy monster truck we bought for our two boys today, when I noticed an amazing disclaimer on the side of the box. “Due to continual changes to our products, the colors and specifications of our products may vary. Product may differ from photos shown. Allow +/- 5% variation in size due to the manufacturing process of finished products.” I had already paid for the toy and was expecting the box to contain the truck pictured on the outside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the colors, specifications, and size were just what I was expecting.

However, can you imagine being the customer for a large software development project and reading a disclaimer like that in your final software documentation? You’d already paid for the software a year earlier. You and your development team spent 2 months uncovering what you thought were “all” of the requirements and specs for the software. You nodded in agreement, the developers nodded in agreement. They went off and developed your software for 10 more months. You had a plan and knew exactly what you’d be getting next year when you opened the box, right? Wrong! You opened the box and it didn’t look anything like what you had asked for last year!

Luckily, using agile practices like Scrum, customers and product owners have a chance to continually see their software product during development at the end of every 2-4 week iteration. Any changes to the original specification are made with complete transparency (usually by the customer or product owner themselves). There shouldn’t be any surprises at the end of a development project. Agile customers should never have to worry about opening their box and finding a pink polka-dotted Malibu Barbie Beach Cruiser instead of a Blue Crusher monster truck.