Getting more done the Agile way

There’s an old saying: “Time, Quality, Scope — Choose any two.” An easy way to reduce coding time is to minimize testing. But lowering quality leads to defects, and defects increase rework. If we slash scope and oversimplify a feature, many customers won’t be able to use it. A feature that most people can’t use is mostly useless.
In practice, there are three well-worn paths to increasing true velocity: (1) Optimize scope, (2) Enhance infrastructure, and (3) Reduce rework.

• To optimize scope, carefully select just the right set of requirements that will allow customers to use the feature, easily and effectively. No more. No less.
• To enhance infrastructure, leverage technology and processes to reduce the human effort needed to take a feature from conception to production.
• To reduce rework, collaborate with stakeholders to ensure the correct features are implemented correctly. 

Here are twelve key checkpoints that can help your team step forward, without taking two steps backward:

• Are we surveying customers to determine must-have threshold features? 
• Are we implementing only the threshold features first? 
• Are we documenting the acceptance tests before we write the code?
• Are we implementing the simplest thing that can possibly pass the acceptance tests?

• Is our unit-test and integration-test scaffolding as helpful as it can possibly be? 
• Is our continuous integration automation as streamlined as it can possibly be? 
• Is our software development lifecycle process transparent and clearly understood?
• Is our team using the best tools for the job?

• Are we getting feedback from customers as early as possible (preferably by providing access to a beta version)?
• Are we re-running all acceptances tests against the final release candidate before a major release?
• Are we writing tests to prove bugs exist before we fix them?
• Are we documenting support case solutions in a knowledge base for future reference?