ABSTRACT
The first and most basic question to ask before you embark on a transition to agile development is: Why?
Why do you want to do this? If you are in a business, there’s only one practical reason to do this. You want to improve your bottom line. You want to make more money. For those of you I just disappointed by my being so Machiavellian about my reasoning, I apologize. However, I haven’t yet run into an organization that wants to transition to agile development to develop better-quality products even if they happen to lose money in the process. Except for government agencies and the Detroit-based auto manufacturing industry, no organization does anything that doesn’t somehow help ensure the organization’s continued existence. In fact, in several years of consulting, I’ve only found one organization that was already happy with their software quality, but wanted to transition to agile development anyway just to see if things could get better (and they found that agile development worked better for them too!).
