Agile Principle 4 developers and business working directly together

Unleashing your developer geeks on unsuspecting business people was quite risky in the 1990′s.

You want this guy riding in to save the day and talk to execs?

Why those geeks may be a bit rough, un-kept and may spill the beans (truth).  They clearly have not transformed in “McDreamy” yet (Patrick Dempsey).  They’re still commuting to work on their lawn mower.

Seems a little silly now.  The prevailing wisdom in much of the early days of micro-computer programming was just that.   Project manager, leads, solutions architects were better suited for that type of interaction (as if they were much “cooler”).  Lock those geeks up in an unused conference, slide some pizza and mountain dew  under the door, and life is good.

There were some approaches, such as the Microsoft Solutions Framework (1995-2004) that advocated combined business and development teams with each role having an equal role (product and program management, development, testing, documentation, etc).  The Agile Manifesto pitched the radical idea that developers and business people (whether those business people were accountants, sales executives or nurses) should work directly.   The premise is adults can and do work together. That premise has been strengthen by the diminishing resource pools of people across all industries since the onset of the 2008-10 Recession. Other disciplines can help to keep an Agile project on task, record its artifacts and communicate it to the rest of the organization.

Sure, unleash this guy, some of your team members will be very happy!

So let your developer out-of-the cubicle… they may turn in a “McDeveloperDreamy”.

business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

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