Fast but not furious
Fast But Not So Furious
Agile collaboration is all about frequent delivery of projects. In a truly agile world, gone are the days of the 12 month project. In an agile world, a 1-6 month project is strategic!
Nowhere is this more true than on the web. The web is a fast moving place. And with the luxury of centrally hosted solutions, there’s every opportunity to break what would have traditionally been a project into a list of features, and deliver incrementally on a very regular basis – ideally even feature by feature.
On the web, it’s increasingly accepted for products/projects to be released early (when they’re basic, not when they’re faulty!). Particularly in the Web 2.0+world, it’s a kind of perpetual beta. In this situation, why wouldn’t you want to derive some benefits early? Why wouldn’t you want to hear real user/customer feedback before you build ‘everything’? Why wouldn’t you want to look at your web metrics and see what works, and what doesn’t, before building ‘everything’?
And this is only really possible due to some of the other important principles of agile collaboration. The iterative approach, requirements being lightweight and captured just-in-time, being feature-driven, testing integrated throughout the lifecycle, and so on.
So how frequent is frequent?
Scrum says break things into 30 day Sprints. That’s certainly frequent compared to most traditional collaboration projects. We break things up in milestones which also happen each couple of weeks, it has the same goal as classic scrum.
Sometimes it makes more sense to use Kanban, which means there are no sprints, but we constantly monitor whats active and make sure no more than 10 stories are in progress and they are really worked on.
30 days is a lifetime!