Flexible Product Development

CHANGE presents a dilemma to product developers. It is the essence of innovation, for which developers strive. As they work every day, product developers discover improvements (innovation), but to incorporate these improvements, plans have to change.

Unfortunately, seasoned developers have learned that midproject change has a high price: schedule overruns, blown budgets, rework, and quality problems. To avoid such complications, it is safer to follow the original plan, leaving the change for the next project—or for a competitor!

Software developers have overcome this dilemma by discovering and applying so-called agile software development: small and dedicated teams, very short development cycles, early testing, and heavy customer involvement. These techniques are a blessing for software development, but they can’t be applied to non-software products directly, because they depend on the malleability of software.

This book dissects agile development, discovers its roots, and rebuilds a set of techniques that allow non-software developers to accommodate change during a project, thus resolving the dilemma of change for hardware products, too!