However in recent years I have seen many people – primarily managers – misunderstand the concept.

Agile is about responding quickly to changes in business needs and delivering demonstrable progress to the customer/end user.

Unfortunately some people think that this means saying “Yes” to everything a client asks for, and not actually having a focussed list of deliverables. Agile doesn’t work without planning and prioritisation. All businesses need everything done “right now” if their wish could come true. In real life this is obviously impossible. That’s why prioritisation is critical. Your “must have” list simply cannot be bigger than your development team’s capacity.

Sensible approaches force you to choose a small set of features you are going to implement, and you stick to that. Then in the next cycle you review what the current “highest priority must-haves” are.

If you don’t do this, you have constantly slipping milestones, feature creep, and overworked (and in the end disgruntled) coders who are often forced to hack things instead of furnish your organisation with a sustainable codebase. One that you can refactor, and supports agile development in the long term.

Failure to accommodate this means you get a [fr]Agile environment and code base, where those “must haves” are even harder to implement at the speed your business needs, and quality soon degrades.

Development is just like sustainable living – you have to keep your footprint low and do things with the longer term in sight. Even if you are operating in a truly Agile fashion.