Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

The responsibilities of the business owner are to do just-in-time planning, filling in the details in the backlog sufficiently that the team will be able to understand the work that needs to be done in the next sprint. They define what it means for a story to be completed. In addition, they are to serve the informational needs of the team, interfacing with the end users and the subject matter experts.

During the course of development, questions are bound to arise. Given a choice of going one way or another, if it is a technical question, then it is up to the team. But if it is a domain or a business choice, then the Business/Product Owner needs to make that decision. For that reason, the the business owner should expect to be working with the team on a daily basis. They should make themselves available to them, perhaps even co-locating with them. They should be proactive, cultivate a culture of questions and feedback from the team.

An all too common mistake is to have a business owner that shares his time between projects. The problem there is, all of the teams suffer as a result. While the company may be paying one less salary, they are getting less productivity out of 15 or more people. Not a wise trade-off.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

The goal of every sprint should be to create something that gives the business a sense of perspective, a frame of reference to use to direct future activities. What you deliver needs to work, at least in some respect or with some limitations, in order to offer the business that sense of perspective. If what you deliver can not be seen by the business, it adds no value.

“But it adds value to the development effort!” you might be thinking. Sure, assuming that your understanding of the direction that you need to go is correct.

Note that you are not simply taking a traditional development project and breaking it into 2-week chunks of work. You are creating a functional piece of software. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of breaking things down functionally, and then trying to map your functional decomposition into a backlog. Too often, you end up with pieces which can not stand alone, which do not deliver value to the business. The business can’t prioritize those kinds of things.

The problem is diving too deep. It’s so easy to do, too. You want to understand the problem, so you divide and clarify, divide and clarify, and at some point you magically and invisibly have gone beyond what you are trying to accomplish and have transitioned into the how of accomplishing it.

Therein is the secret of making sure your backlog includes only items that add value: They only tell you what it must do for the business, it does not specify how it is done. Review every user story, and ask yourself: “Is this telling me what the system needs to do, or is it telling me how the system works?” If it is the latter, change it to be the former. If you can’t, then you probably broke down the functionality too far, and that story needs to be rolled into another one that it supports.

It takes discipline, and maybe even a shift in ways of thinking, but you need to deliver something that “works” every time. It may be a mock-up or a prototype, it may not do everything it needs to do when initially delivered, but it is something that the business can see and wrap their brains around. The purpose of this is to empower the business to give their guidance sooner rather than later, and save everyone the frustration of wasted effort.

“But isn’t a prototype a waste of time?” Not really. Build it right and you can simply refactor it as necessary to make it into what it needs to be. And in the worst case, if you have to throw the whole thing away, you still ended up with valuable understanding of the problem, and that all-important frame of reference for the business to guide forward progress.

So, deliver working software. But deliver it often. Very often. Here’s why:

• If you have a term paper due in six months, what is the likelihood that you will finish it tomorrow? What is the likelihood that you will do the bulk of the work the night before it is due? The longer the sprint length, the more this tendency might rear its ugly head.
• The bigger the sprint backlog, the more overwhelming it can feel, whether there is any reason for it or not. So, the longer the sprint, the bigger the sprint backlog, the harder it is to focus, for some people.
• The shorter the duration, the sooner the business can give its feedback, the more Agile you become.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

A basic tenet of Agile software is to deliver Value to the business. The challenge is to do this in the face of continuously changing priorities and/or requirements.
Part of what causes the priorities or requirements to change is a basic truth in psychology: it’s easier to see what is in front of you than it is to operate mentally on a figment of your imagination. The more concrete things become, the more the definition seems to change.

What this also means is that the more frequently you deliver something that works, the faster the business gets to see the truth of what they had asked for. This allows them to evaluate it in a concrete way, and thereby be empowered to offer meaningful feedback on it.

But delivering something that ‘works’ is only half of the equation. What works should be something that adds value. Time spent working on something that no one will use is time wasted. Delivering something that costs more to create than it will earn or save for the company is also time wasted. There may come a point in the project where there is still plenty to work on, but none of it adds enough value to be worth the investment. A good product owner will recognize that point, and the project will end. A good team will help identify when that point is reached.

When breaking down the work that is to be done, keep this in mind. If it doesn’t add value by itself, don’t deliver it by itself. If something else adds more value, do that first. But don’t fall into the trap of needing to deliver everything all at once. Really, all ‘features’ are not created equal.