Features vs. cycle time?!

Agile toolkit podcast had a great recent episode with Jim Highsmith, one of the original Agile Manifesto co-authors.

The insight I liked the most was that features should not be traded off against quality, as per Ken Schwaber’s suggestion. It’s not a like for like comparison, i.e. comparing apples to oranges. While quality is important,and it can be improved with practices like code reviews, it doesn’t impact the company income statment as explicitly.

Instead, “cycle time” has greater business meaning than “quality”. Cycle time is effectively responsiveness to market and client feedback. You can invest time into making your cycle time very low, i.e. feeling comfortable releasing many times per day, if you have little technical debt and a good automated test suite. While there is little business interest in these technical process by products , being able to rapidly release a feature that a prospect suggests can clearly have an impact on sales.

Related articles

• AgileDC 2012 – Jim Highsmith – Organizational Agility and Adaptive Leadership (nofluffjuststuff.com)
• Brief History of Agile Movement (offshore-agile.com)
• Agile Isn’t Just for Geeks Anymore (blogs.gartner.com)
• Four Tests to Determine If You Are Following Agile Development (sys-con.com)