Do the Simplest Thing That Will Knock Their Socks Off
It appears that I am not the only one wondering if the pragmatic keep it real approach to software development will result in programs that are missing that something extra, those features that you can not do without the moment you find them.
Kathy writes:
Our users will tell us where the pain is. Our users will drive incremental improvements. But the user community can’t do the revolutionary innovation for us. That’s up to us.
Dave takes a more direct approach when he writes:
It does seem, though, that agile teams will be less likely to either prioritize or implement some of the more subtle touches of the kind that the Wired article discusses. When forced to choose between the features “Send email”, and “Implement graceful date column resizing”, guess which one is likely to get short shrift.
An excellent example of this type of feature, a feature that you didn’t know you needed until you saw it, is iTunes smart shuffle. It “allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album”.
I don’t know how I managed without it.
I can not help but wonder whether this feature would have been added by the agile keep it real approach? It is not an essential feature, and I would not have noticed if it was not there. But the fact that it is makes me a very happy user.
August 2nd, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Not really sure what is meant by “the agile keep it real approach”.
In an agile process you could select the features you want and implement them in an order of some priority that is important to you or the customer. That doesn’t exclude cool features.
And who’s to say an agile approach isn’t used with iTunes.
August 2nd, 2006 at 9:03 pm
What I mean by “the agile keep it real approach” is not doing it unless requested and being aggressive in the features that you leave out.
I am not saying that Agile projects can not include cool features. But how often do you see bells and whistles given a high enough priority to get them done? Outside of initiatives such as the Atlassian Fedex days I have not seen it happen.
August 3rd, 2006 at 2:02 am
As I said on David’s blog – I see it all of the time… and I see it /more/ in agile groups than non-agile ones.
I really don’t see how an agile team can be less responsive than a non-agile ones. They get their feedback so much more quickly, and can respond to change so much more readily.
Also, while “Getting Real” is still sitting in my to-read folder with a bazillion other things – my experience of the 37signals folks apps is that they’re full of exactly those delightful little features that we’re talking about…