Agile

From Wikiexpert

I signed the agile manifesto back in 2005. As i get further into learning knowledge management, I have been researching Rally and Appian. Appian is a BPM software, and Rally provides project management software within an agile framework.

As Tom and Kai Gilb puts on their blog post, who cares if you have working software, the real question is "Did I deliver improved value of any kind to my stakeholder?"

This goes back to Deming, and the inputs and the output of a process. One of the criticizes of Agile is that it is developer centric. Take Rally, for example. If people provide input to the software, but don't understand why they are using it within a framework for agile, the input is bound to be corrupt. This malformed data jeopardizes the the entire iteration. If you put your customer's needs as primary, they will naturally support your needs, and take you places you never would have gone.

The output of the software development needs to meet the needs of the business. Deming stresses that people tend to measure the wrong thing. Is your "software working", or is is it supporting a business process?

The old saying is true: Garbage in, Garbage out. As we used to say at HP, I would rather have no data than bad data.