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In my mind, active user involvement is the first of 10 key agile principles. It’s not always possible to have users directly involved in development projects, particularly if the agile development project is to build a product where the real end users will be external customers or consumers. In this event it is imperative to have a senior and experienced

An agile development team must include all the necessary team members to make decisions, and make them on a timely basis. Active user involvement is one of the key agile principles to enable this, so the user or user representative from the business must be closely involved on a daily basis. The project team must be empowered to make decisions

In agile development, requirements evolve, but timescales are fixed. This is in stark contrast to a traditional development project, where one of the earliest goals is to capture all known requirements and baseline the scope so that any other changes are subject to change control. Traditionally, users are educated that it’s much more expensive to change or add requirements during

Agile development teams capture requirements at a high level and on a piecemeal basis, just-in-time for each feature to be developed. Agile requirements are ideally visual and should be barely sufficient, i.e. the absolute minimum required to enable development and testing to proceed with reasonable efficiency. The rationale for this is to minimise the time spent on anything that doesn’t

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Likewise, agile development projects are delivered in small bite-sized pieces, delivering small, incremental *releases* and iterating. In more traditional software development projects, the (simplified) lifecycle is Analyse, Develop, Test – first gathering all known requirements for the whole product, then developing all elements of the software, then testing that

Agile development is all about frequent delivery of products. In a truly agile world, gone are the days of the 12 month project. In an agile world, a 3-6 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

In agile development, “done” should really mean “DONE!”. Features developed within an iteration (Sprint in Scrum), should be 100% complete by the end of the Sprint. Too often in software development, “done” doesn’t really mean “DONE!”. It doesn’t mean tested. It doesn’t necessarily mean styled. And it certainly doesn’t usually mean accepted by the product owner. It just means developed.