Dan Willis — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:49:18 GMT

I’m buying Austin’s one sprint lag. The argument over the creation of story cycles >1 can actually be pretty simple: “Okay,we can get the story cycle number back down, just add 4-6 weeks to the sprint.” Nobody’s going to want that.

There is one line in Austin’s new post that I think is a little hinky. When he says “Design and architecture CAN’T be managed using agile methods” I think an absolute statement like that wastes the most useful commonality between design and agile development, that they are both iterative. That’s not a minor point.

In an agile environment, some part of the design solution should be flexible enough to allow for things that are discovered from one sprint to the next. This requires making an educated guess on the overall design so as not to hold each sprint’s development hostage to that design.

Thinking and Making: Comments by Dan Willis