Agile Development Benefits and Pitfalls

Agile development is an important tool used in today's interactive product design process. It not only reduces both long-term and short-term risks, it also helps with merging short-term goals with long-term vision.

Short-term risks such as scope creep, poor usability, "integration hell", stakeholder insecurity and path backtracking is avoidable by:

1. ensuring deliverables are in manageable sizes that can be contained
2. providing manageable identifiable milestones that can be integrated into usability testing cycles
3. providing development teams with sufficient blocks of time ( up to 30%) to be able to focus on necessary supplementary coding/management tasks
4. allowing stakeholders to review the progress, thereby reducing the inclination to resort to reactionary project management and
5. having the dev team and stakeholders inspect and adapt to ensure they are on the right path without having to massively backtrack to an earlier path

Project Management Warning!
A common assumption: "Now that we have Agile Development, let's do away with Waterfall Development techniques... jump right in. We can shift quickly anyway...." This is a false perception that can lead to time loss and a misdirection by being caught up in the product design "fog & mud if Iteration -1: Pre-Project Planning is omitted.

* Product Design Fog - is a result of poorly defined intentions previously mis-set during the Define and Discover (Iteration -1: Pre-Project Planning) phase. No matter how quickly you move, the team will walk around with a myopic vision of 'why are we doing what we are doing?"' It is necessary and valid to spend the time to do the extensive research upfront to define your objectives and structure to avoid the fog.
* Product Design Mud - is a result of poorly understood team capabilities, technical restrictions, market acceptance, investor/stakeholder willingness and/or personal inabilities. Knowing thyself and the internal and external realities will reduce this effect... And no amount of agile development will get you out of mud unless these are addressed.

Merging short-term goals with long-term vision (which includes business requirements) is something that agile development is perfect for. After the development environment, architectural foundation, and inter-communications layer is complete; it is fairly easy to produce the initial vanguard value proposition of the product and from there continue to activate/install or build-out feature-sets to enhance overall user capabilities.

In today's wealth of ubiquitous tools, code snippets, and modules there is little need to have extensive recreation of a feature-set for most feature-sets can be activated within minutes or hours, since they only require modification. You should be able to produce the core value UX within a matter of weeks.

Long-term benefits should include the ability for easy modular improvements - with clean in-code documentation, a simple CMS for the post-launch maintenance phase, and a closely aligned vision/product. Since product developments sprints are inspected and adapted in shorter time frames there is a wider spread of accountability, which leads to less individual stress.