An Agile solution is something that is hard to get your head round at first. But, once you have been through an Agile delivery once or twice, you understand what it really is.
Agile is about fulfilling a user process by means which ensure an outcome is achieved based on agreed acceptance criteria. Its a lovely and very flexible phrase that helps the user community and the IT community partner to get to something that fulfils both needs.
Take an example like this:
“As an account manager I want to be able to go to the account screen and obtain the accounts I am responsible for”
Now, as a rough story its kinda ok. There is quite a bit missing regarding security, regarding logon, regarding the format of the file, the words ‘responsible for’ is as vague as a anything could be…BUT could you as a developer, business analyst, tester or project manager roughly work out what the user is trying to do. Yes, my hope is that you answered yes, you could roughly understand what they want to do.
Depending on your lean, you will now take one of many views on how to deliver this – you could want to pull user credentials into your application so that the results are in an on screen visible table and already filtered for the user as they enter the page. You could take a view that actually the reports are graphs and charts and show all the details in a graphical sense. You could take the view that the user is merely logging into a SharePoint site and clicking on a filtered list of pre-run PDF reports… You could take the view that you need to have a security model in place to stop anyone accessing the accounts screen if they don’t have permissions. Once they are in, they enter a secondary password which allows access to a secure connection to filtered accounts data. This data is viewable via several different methods such as graphical (bar, line and pie charts) as well as in an interactive tabular format.
You could take the view that going to the “account screen” doesn’t actually bring up a screen at all and instead it just produces an extract of all of the data within the accounts database and the user would have to filter within Excel and sort them selves out.
ALL OF THESE ANSWERS ARE CORRECT!
One that I suspect that wasn’t considered in your head was this. The user goes to the ‘accounts screen’, they select the report they want via a short form and a person emails them a manually produced (hand cranked) report within a defined time of say, two hours.
All of those produce the same result – the user has a copy of the accounts they are responsible for. What you need to make sure is that your acceptance criteria allow for your to ensure that your Minimum Viable Product is exactly that – its the minimum that the user is willing to accept to say that the application produces outcome required.
As soon as you realise that, you are on to a good thing…