DZone

Building a new software product is a highly innovative and creative process. Things simply don’t go to plan all the time, setbacks and failures are inevitable along the way. What makes a difference is how a team deals with them. Each failure is an opportunity to reassess, make a change and try a different approach. In order to succeed, teams must become resilient to failure and focus on the learning outcomes that they present. When we feel that it is safe to fail we are more likely to try risker experiments, and sometimes these riskier experiments have huge payoffs. Early on in a project, prioritising the product backlog by the user stories that bring the largest learning outcomes is hugely beneficial. Teams should ask,"What do we know the least about?" or, "What is our riskiest assumption on the project right now?" and prioritise this work to maximise their learning outcomes.

Time for a quick thought experiment. Think back to a time when you worked as part of a team that built a new software product and work out roughly how long it took to deliver the project from start to finish. Now, imagine if you could do the whole project all over again, with the exact same people and the exact same budget but with one big difference: this time your team already knows everything that they collectively learned during the project. Every rabbit hole and dead end you all hit would be avoided this time round due to these new collective learning. How much faster would the same result be achieved?

Source: DZone