The Essence of Agile Software Development

I finally got around to reading an excellent article by Alistair Cockburn entitled Are iterations hazardous to your project?. He states the case that often iterations devolve into mere planning windows, without resulting in valuable feedback from customers on running, tested features.

Feedback is the key to agile software development. Agile techniques (from pair programming to TDD to tracking velocity and generating release and iteration burndown charts) work because they provide rapid feedback. The more feedback, and the sooner we get it, the better. Mike Bria put it best in the XP mailing list:

"feedback... is to agile as water is to ice"

Feedback is not just an element of agile software development; it is the very essence of it. Keep this in mind and you'll be able to steer your way out of almost any pitfall in your adoption of agile techniques.

However, as my good friend Daniel De Aguiar is fond of pointing out, feedback by itself is not sufficient. We need to analyze the information we're getting, and act on it, to make feedback useful. In response to a sneak preview of this post, Danny replied:

"Opportunities for feedback analysis throughout the iteration are critical to success. Otherwise, the feedback is just noise."

I agree. Many teams are getting feedback through some of the practices mentioned above but don't squeeze enough benefit out of it. For example, often teams will diligently create burndown charts but ignore the red flags that such charts are meant to expose. If you're going to gather feedback, make use of it!

You can read Danny's thoughts on the matter here.