Agile Principle 2: “Welcome Changing Requirements, Even Late in Development. Agile Processes Harness Change for the Customer’s Competitive Advantage”

Delivering valuable software frequently is the name of the game. Requirements will change throughout the lifecycle of your project. Some changes you will be able to accommodate sooner and faster than other changes. Requirements can change for several reasons: new information, clearer understanding, changing market dynamics. Your development process must not only allow for change, but encourage and generate change, so that the product you deliver is valuable to your customer at the time you deliver it. Customers require what is valuable; customers don’t require what was valuable last year. Vignettes from leaders at Centene Corporation, Oracle, Amazon, and Nokia illustrate the objective, the challenges, and solutions relative to this principle. Leaders will experience changing requirements throughout the development process. To address these challenges, leaders establish a repeatable, sustainable process for generative dialogue with their customer. The leader ensures roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. The joint team—developers, business owners, testers—executes in an agile manner, which in turn allows for, accommodates, and even encourages changing requirements throughout the process. This iterative and conjunctiveConjunctive process generates products and solutions that enable the customer’s competitive advantage.