My Take December 28, 2008, 10:23PM EST

Agile Software Development: Bridges to the Future

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Maplewood (Minn.)-based BusinessWeek.com reader Kevin Matheny is senior e-business architect for BestBuy.com. He is also BusinessWeek.com Editor-in-Chief John A. Byrne's 2,500th follower on Twitter, where he's @kevinmatheny.

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An agile business is willing to deliver part of the solution now to start generating value now. What part of the value proposition can you deliver within two months? Get that done and roll it out. Find out what people think of it, and change course as needed.

For Remix, we focused on a limited scope (read-only product catalog data). We know we have an imperfect solution—there's more latency in the data than we want, we don't have a commerce API yet, and our store-level availability data is a nightly snapshot rather than real-time. But we have something out there in the wild that people can use and react to, and we're getting real feedback on what works and what doesn't. We're also realizing value out of what we do have now, rather than in two years.

Making Change Work for You

When you are dealing with a moving target, trying to control change only hampers your ability to course-correct. Don't try to create complete documentation up front. It will be out of date before you are done. Do have a good system for keeping all team members up to date on what you're doing. Regular meetings are one way to do this, but keep them short. Remind the team that the important thing is the outcome, not the path to it. Create the documentation as you go, recording what the system does, not what it's supposed to do.

For example, I recently added a story to the tracker for Remix that read simply "flag products as new if their start display date is less than 30 days in the past." That's all the up-front documentation needed for Pivotal Labs, a development company that specializes in agile software development, to code that function into Remix. Any additional information can be gathered in the daily 15-minute team meetings or in a longer follow-up if more time is required.

Trust is tied closely to how you deal with change. Often, extending trust is hard for businesspeople working on technology projects, because we don't know how to do the work. We often look to the documentation—requirements, design specifications, and the like—to give us the feeling of control over the outcome. Don't bother. If you can't trust your team to deliver, you have the wrong team.

Find people you can trust, and then let them do the work. Talk every day, and make sure that the development team has direct access to someone who will be using the product every day after release. For Remix, we've never had a formal project plan, never had a requirements-gathering session, never created a requirements document. We chose the right partners, told them what we needed, and got to work. We have control over the outcomes, but we're not worried about trying to control the details of how we get there.

Agility Benefits

Aside from reducing risk of failure or irrelevance due to long time frames, there are three other key benefits to embracing agility. Your projects will consume fewer resources, so you'll have a lower barrier to entry for your project process. You'll be able to try more things, increasing your chances of finding the standout ideas. You'll get feedback more quickly, so you can identify what's working and what isn't—and cut your losses on the things that are not working. And as you'll be putting part of the solution in play quickly, you'll be able to start recouping the financial investment in your project sooner.

Becoming agile isn't easy, but it's increasingly necessary as the pace of change in the world increases. And it's incredibly rewarding as well. Not only do we get results more quickly, I spend more time on productive activities instead of on documentation, administrative busywork, and fighting over whether what we got was what we wanted. For your next project, try becoming agile. You'll never look back.

Kevin Matheny is senior e-business architect for BestBuy.com. He joined Best Buy in 2000 to help relaunch BestBuy.com, and is living proof that dual-majoring in anthropology and sociology, reading comic books, and playing computer games does not make you unemployable. He lives in Maplewood, Minn., and is BusinessWeek.com Editor-in-Chief John A. Byrne's 2,500th Twitter follower. He can be found on Twitter @kevinmatheny.