So grab your client, pull’em in

Sit’em down, let’s begin

IT”S THE AGILE DANCE!

Thomas Landspurg says that the Agile Development takes two. In other words the Agile approach to development require heavy client input. He’s right.

Thomas Landspurg is the CTO of mobile game maker In-Fusio.

Thomas runs a blog called TomSoft, and he was kind enough to post about my Waterfall Drives IT Engineer Over the Edge - you can see Thomas’ response here.

Here are his key points:

• The Waterfall has been taught as “The Method” for CS development at Universities for years. It will take a big effort to over come that
• The clients have a job to do. Before they get to a finished product, they have to sit with their developers and provide feedback.
• If the IT developers do not get direct client input, they are forced to go with the Requirements Doc and nothing else.

Setting up a culture of creative feedback is critical to the success of any IT project, and especially one that uses Agile Development Techniques.

Perhaps this is why so many companies release their 1.0 version as a “Beta”. By calling it a Beta, they are creating a client expectation that they should be providing feedback if they don’t like what they see.

To me, this is yet another example of how Enterprise Blogs can be used to speed innovation within an organization.

If, for every IT project, you set up an “Agile System Development Blog”, you create a platform where all users can efficiently communicate with all IT engineers.