Delivering Value - Uncovering The Real Needs

The key to Agile and Lean methodologies is “the rapid delivery of customer value”. Anything that does not add value is considered waste. In Agile, value is often defined as “working code” but this is too narrow a definition. It assumes that the only stakeholders that matter are the end users of the software and that the only product the team needs to produce is the software.

In reality, the team is unlikely to be producing just software. At the very least there will be documentation and other end user collateral. There will also be artifacts that are not valuable to the end user but may be of immense value to other stakeholders. It could be argued then that pretty much anything turned out by the team has value to someone. So what is waste? Working code is too narrow. Absolutely anything the team does is too wide.