12 Agile Principles — #1 of 12

Early and Continuous Delivery of Valuable Software

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

The first principle emphasizes “early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” In many traditional plan-driven projects prior to agile, the end-user customer doesn’t see anything until the final user acceptance test phase of the project, and by that time it is very difficult and expensive to make any changes that might be needed.

Emphasizing early delivery of the software accomplishes two major goals:

1. It provides an opportunity for the customer to see the software early in the development cycle and provide feedback and input so that corrections can be made quickly and easily.

2. Working software is a good measure of progress. It’s much more accurate and effective to measure progress in terms of incremental software functionality that has actually been completed, tested, and delivered to the user’s satisfaction rather that attempting to measure the percentage of completion of a very large development project that is incomplete.

It is very difficult to accurately measure progress of a large software development project as a whole without breaking it up into pieces. That can be a very subjective judgment with some amount of guesswork. Breaking up the effort into well-defined pieces that each have clearly defined criteria for being considered “done” provides a much more factual and objective way of measuring progress.