What is the Value of Agile?

Organizations want to have insight in the values that Agile can bring them. They want to know if and how Agile can help to satisfy customer needs more quickly, and what they can do to increase productivity and reduce development and operations costs.

But do we know the value that agile can bring to organizations? Can we measure it? Learn which agile practices are valuable, under which circumstances? These questions still largely remain unanswered.

In May 2014 the Agile Consortium organized The Impact and Value of Agile. At that event I presented the State of Affairs in Agile Value creation. Below are my views on the Value of Agile, supported with a list of published and ongoing research in this area.

Agile delivers Value

I'm convinced that Agile delivers Value. But what is Value? Here are some examples.

Agile helps to deliver the right product to your customers. A product which does what customers need and that they are willing to pay for. Economical Quality I like to call it. Customer collaboration is the key practice area in Agile that makes this possible.

Products can be delivered quicker by working in iterations. In multi-disciplined teams professionals work together to deliver working software, shorten communication loops and reducing the lead time from idea to working software.

Agile with the support of Lean helps teams to remove waste and only do things that have value. By focusing on the customer needs with the highest value multitasking is reduced. Effective collaboration and communication in teams also reduces process overhead.

In teams people help and support each other and care for each other. Self-organized teams provide freedom for professionals to work in their own way and find better, sustainable ways to do their work.

My personal view is that lower costs are a result of delivering the right product quickly to customers, with increased productivity and happy employees. Higher quality results in less technical debt and lower maintenance. If lowering costs is your primairy goal why you want to do Agile it will most probaby not succeed. But it certainly be a result from adopting agile.

Agile can only work if teams are truly self-organized. It allows professionals to fully take responsibility for the work that they do. Continuous improvement will result as teams will recognize potential improvements in the way that they work and will take action. Some examples of techniques that teams can use to continously improve are Kanban and Retrospectives.

Agile Value Matters

It is important to know the value that Agile can deliver and to be able to measure it. Adopting Agile requires an investement as any organizational change. Organization will spend money and time on training and coaching. It will impact the way that the organization is structured and managed. For managers to decide if and how they want to adopt agile they will need information that helps them to estimate the value that Agile can bring for their organization.

Wether or not Agile has value is also important for teams and team members. My experience is that people find quality and the way that they do their work important. They want to develop themselves as professionals. Also it is important for people to know that they are doing the right thing, things that matter for their customers and their stakeholders. It really motivates teams if they see that the products that they developed are being used (that is one reason why product demo’s are so important).

Measuring the value of Agile

We’ve been measuring in software development since the 1970’s. The 1968 NATO conference on Software Engineering was one of the main triggers as it considers software development to be a science, something that we can scientifically study, measure, analyse and improve.

People like Barry Boehm, Capers Jones, Larry Putnam and Tom Gilb and organizations like the SEI (SEMA department), ISBSG and Nesma, SMS (now part of DCG), and QSM have explored the area of measuring software engineering. Most software development methods and models include information on how you can do measurements, e.g. CMMI, RUP.

Measuring value is not a new thing. But still, there is little published about it, in particular related to agile software development. Here’s a list of studies that I know on measuring the value of Agile:

• Empirical studies of agile software development by Alarcos
• The Agile Impact Report by QSM for Rally Software.
• The Business Value of Using Agile Project … by David F. Rico.
• Economics of Software Quality by Jones and Bonsignour
• Evidence of Success of Agile Projects Columbus Agile Productivity
• Agile Werkt by Hennie Huijgens
• Evaluating Agile and Scrum … by Capers Jones
• Agile Performance Metrics by Rally and SEI
• Agile portfolio management … by Christoph Johann Stettina
• Agile Benchmarks and Reports by Donald Reifer (paid service)

If you have investigated the value of Agile, and have published about it, I would love to hear from you!

Impact and Value of Agile

At the event Impact and Value of Agile I presented the State of Affairs in Agile Value creation.

At the same event Larry Maccherone from Rally presented results from their ongoing study on Agile performance metrics and Frank Vogelezang gave a presentation on the financial results of agile. Together these 3 presentation provided an overview of Agile Value Creation. Highly recommended!

Creating Agile Value

Value is in the eye of the beholder. Something can be valuable for one organizations, while others consider it to be less important. My advice is to think about what matters for your customers, define relevant and useful measurements and start measuring the value that Agile creates for your organization.

The studies mentioned above can help you to define valuable measurements, build a business case, establish a baseline, and make the value visible.

Note: This LinkedIn post is based on the blog post Agile Value Creation which was published earlier this year on Ben Linders - Sharing my Experience.