Methodology? Shaken, stirred… blended!
Agile or not agile? Lean or mean? No pain, no gain? Interval or iterative? Are we talking about the latest fad in fitness? Not really, although with jargon it is always difficult to tell. The last years have witnessed a deluge of methodologies, recipes, practices and books about software engineering. Agile ideas have been hailed with candor and bashed without remorse. Lean user experience, design sprints and even loving metrics are now part of any development toolkit.
Whisky lovers enjoy the single malt vs blended debate (I love both!). With software engineering, experience is queen, and it is better to avoid following a single overhyped methodology. Rest assured that the right blend is a blessing. At Kigg group, we have dived in the methodology cornucopia to find our own Wise blend of Agile and Lean methodologies and we wish to share our delicious concoction ;-)
First, follow with gusto the following key organizational principles: (1) Be customer-centric with caveats, (2) Create hierarchically flexible emergent teams, (3) Work at an elastic sustainable pace, (4) Start by developing minimalistic but useful products that can become maximal, and (5) Accept change; in fact, plan for it!
Then, put things in practice: (6) Develop iteratively, time-boxing and freezing functionality during iterations that produce a working release of the product, (7) Treat tests as a key resource to embody your focus on quality, (8) Express requirements through scenarios, (9) Understand the coupling of feature-based development and dependencies, and (10) Embrace the fractal interaction between business and technology of any digital transformation.
Of course, analyze any software development project before attempting to solve it, and plan the fundamental architecture of the solution before embarking on the details. Then, repeat a virtuous multi-scale multi-iterative cycle of 4 phases: study, design, production (with several sub-iterations) and learning.
In the end, success in the development of digital products requires a combination of methodology and attitude. We have our own Kigg Way… and we Kigg Ass ;-)
