Development by Telephone Game

Does your development process have a lot in common with the Telephone Game (also called Chinese Whispers or Russian Scandal)? I mean, how many steps, and how many people, are involved in getting what the users want into their hands?

Do the users tell their management, who tell the prime contractor's systems engineers, who tell your system engineers, who tell you what to build? Then, do you give your build off to the integration team, who gives it to the maintenance team to give to the users? Let's see, that's seven steps between the users and the end product.

That's one key area where open-source does it right, because they have to. The user submits a bug or new feature to the developers. The developers fix it or build it and give it back. That's one step (OK, there's probably a couple internal steps for reviews, and testing, but I overlooked those in the first example, so I'm overlooking them in this example too). And funny enough, it creates a stable product that delivers the functionality the user wanted faster than "Doing it the right way."

Are you naive enough to think "But think of how good the product would be if they did it our way?" The reason open source works (and work fast) is that there aren't multiple steps between the user and his product. The best tools are used BY the developers (see GCC for example) during development. If there's uncertainty, the developer talks to the user. There's no "pushing issues up the chain" and waiting for resolution. There's just a need, and the fulfillment of that need.

So call it Agile, call it XP, call it whatever you want. But if you base your development around creating user functionality instead of data functionality or system functionality, you will produce more user-usable functionality faster, simply because everything you build addresses some user need.