Why Bother With Design?
A colleague forwarded along an excellent essay explaining various development practices, the most interesting of which is the Stage-Gate process. Let’s look at a sample 12-month period, greatly simplified:
Waterfall: Take 12 months to throw 1 huge blob against the wall. If it sticks, great. If not, you’ve failed.
Agile: Every month, throw 1 small blob against the wall. By month 12, you’ll have a bigger, stickier blob than Waterfall. But it will still be one blob.
Stage-Gate: Every month throw many smaller blobs against the wall. Nurture the blobs that stick, recycle the ones that didn’t. By month 12 you’ll have a few sticky blobs; more than Agile.
What’s missing is that none of these practices prescribe any method to increase the likelihood that something sticks.
To quote Daniel Cook, the author of the afore-linked article, “It is better to release less than it is to release more of poor quality”.
To quote Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of modern video gaming, “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”
If your only change is to implement Agile or Stage-Gate (or both) then you’re bound to fall into that trap. Shoveling more “piles of software” at your customers isn’t likely to endear them to your organization.
I’m reminded of an email from Kim Goodwin to the “Cooper U Alumni” mailing list:
The root of the problem with agile methods is that people are trying to fix a non-engineering problem with a method that comes from within engineering. At Cooper, we tend to think that agile methods arose primarily as programmer self-defense, based on the assumption that the people coming up with the spec (usually marketing) aren’t really going to be able to figure things out without going through a lot of iterations. Of course, most of our clients who’ve tried agile methods have realized they still don’t solve the problem of what to build and how it should behave, because these aren’t engineering problems [emphasis mine - Rob].
While Agile and Stage-Gate reduce risk, how about getting to the root of the problem and supplying your customers with something they can’t live without?
Neither practice will help you do this, but they won’t hurt.