I spoke a little about all of the good things you get from adopting an agile approach to planning development of a product, so to keep the universe in balance I should point out some of the evil lurking around the corner.
I think the success of this approach ultimately is totally dependent on having the right people involved. Try this with the wrong team, and there would be a big mess on your hands. The headline is that agile planning requires a mature body of thought behind the design, and proper consideration of each change that is proposed. You should be refining and enhancing the design, with clear purpose and structured thinking behind each decision. If you’re in a situation where you’re just chucking new features at a product that would be cool then it’s all gone bad.
The very few times that we’ve rushed to work on a change without this process, it’s gone wrong.
I think it’s a very healthy thing to have someone on the team who is very creative, and always coming up with new ideas and suggestions. However that needs to be balanced by someone who is very focused on the interaction design of the product as a whole, and is able to push back and say no if necessary.
The benefits are really significant. I continue to be surprised by how much you learn as you go during development, and it would be criminal to waste all of the new information and thinking.
An agile approach should mean a continuous, rigorous design process, rather than design upfront, then implementation. If it means that you bypass the design process and are using it as an excuse to jump straight to code, then you’re an evil monkey. Evil, evil monkey.
