Principle #1 – Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
This is the first principle of Agile. This principle says, ‘our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software’. Let’s try to understand this principle further. As a team we may have different priorities, towards organization and towards clients like delivering project/product on time, in budget and with quality, but among these priorities, our highest priority should be to satisfy the customer. How can we make customer satisfied? We can make customer satisfied with early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Now there are various terms.
First, we take early delivery. What is early delivery means. It means delivery happens in small iterations and after every few weeks, not in months or years. Early means at a point where cost and impact of change is less. Every iteration customer is getting something which is valuable to him and his/her clients. Something which can help him/her generate revenue from the start of project, they should not be waiting for months/years for something to go live and getting business for them. It should be happening from the early phases of development.
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Principle #2 – Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage
This is the second important principle of Agile. People interpret that work can be pulled anytime during the sprint. As we are agile, teams should be flexible in taking the interrupts at any point of time. It is true that for customer’s competitive advantage, teams should welcome the changes and plan their next steps accordingly. Teams should be flexible in taking work in between the sprint also. But there should be some process being followed.
Whenever such situation comes, team and PO should work together. Team should get it clarified the priorities for this sprint. If interrupt is of high priority, then some other item(s) should be pulled out of the sprint backlog. If interrupt can wait till the sprint is over, then PO should arrange the backlog items in high priority order, so team knows that what is the priority for them in next sprint. So team’s working is purely driven by customer’s priorities, though team would have limited capacity, whole scrum team should work on sprint plan accordingly.