Agile Discovery & Delivery: Simplicity

I wish everyone reading a very happy July 4th weekend! I’ve had a couple of free days this weekend with nothing planned and they reminded me just how important the idea of “simplicity” really is. I’ve used them to get the manuscript for my upcoming book Agile Discovery & Delivery ready to upload to Amazon. That should happen TODAY! If you can’t wait to purchase it, you can check out my pre-order link here. The eBook has been the #1 New Release in the Software Engineering category almost the entire time it’s been open for pre-orders. I am so thrilled and humbled by the excitement and support I’m getting from friends, colleagues, my former students, and strangers. The paperback and hardcover options should be available on or shortly after July 18th.

Book Excerpt: Simplicity Principle

Today, I’d like to share another book excerpt from the first chapter: An Agile Software Development Overview. In this chapter, I discuss what “agile” is, waterfall vs. agile, the agile manifesto, and the agile principles.

Just like children, I’ll never admit that I have favorites between the various agile principles (oh wait, I actually DO talk about my favorites in the book!). That being said, this might be one of them. Here’s how I explain the agile principle of “simplicity”.

Simplicity

Agile software development maximizes the following (not an exhaustive list):

• The number of meetings we’re NOT in
• The number of lines of code we DON’T write
• The pages of documentation we DON’T produce
• The number of dependencies we DON’T have
• Time spent on the most important tasks
• Team communication effectiveness
• The speed with which we remove team blockers
• Each team’s decision-making abilities and empowerment

With agile development, simplicity guides everything we do as a software development team.

“The simplest solution is almost always the best solution.” – Occam’s razor

Agile teams strive to incorporate simplicity in everything they build. The smaller and more decoupled (free from dependencies on other system parts) a solution is, the easier it is to add features.

Thanks for reading! If you know of anyone who might enjoy my book, I would love it if you would pass the link on to them!