There is a continuing discussion in the agile community about delivering value in the order set by the customer. Along with this discussion is the use of the word DONE. A popular phrase is no requirement or piece of software can be considered DONE until it is put to use.
This is a software developers point of view of course. But there is another view of software based products. It starts with the Measures of Effectiveness for the resulting product. These Measures of Effectiveness are:
Operational measures of success that are closely related to the achievements of the mission or operational objectives evaluated in an operation environment, under specific conditions.
This measure of DONE is not directly related to code, testing, requirements or anything like that. It is related to how Effective the software is in delivering the capabilities needed to fulfill the mission or business case.
The individual requirements and pieces of code that implement them can be - or should be - traceable to these capabilities. For each Measure of Effectiveness, we then need a Measure of Performance. These measures characterise:
The functional or physical attributes relating to the system's operation, measured or estimated under specific conditions.
These are also not direclty related to producing code, running tests, or other direct software activities.
All the software design, testing, integration, etc. supports the creation of the ability to produce these Measures of Performance and Effectiveness. For the end user, all the development work is behind the scenes. What the customer actually bought was the ability to do something useful. To put a capability of the software system to work accomplishing a business need. Make money with this capability of course.
So What Does All This Mean?
It means that if you start at the bottom - with the software development processes - you're likley not going to see what the real picture is. This picture is that the customer paid for capabilities, measured in units of effectiveness and performance.
When we start with methods, paradigms, even cockamamie ones like not estimating the cost of the work effort needed to produce the capabilities, we loose the connection to why we are here. We are here to produce software that provides a capability. Likely more than one capability.
So when we hear words like - we can manage projects without knowing the cost or we'll let the requirements emerge, or the customer doesn't really know what they want, so we'll get started so they can decide along the way, ask how you are going to recognize DONE, before running out of time and money?
How Do We Discover the Needed Capabilities?
Once we've decided that capabilities are in fact the place to start, how are they gathered. Here's the top level set of activities.
Once we have these, we can start to elicit the technical and operational requirements that will fullfill these capabilities.
These requirements can be emergent, they can evolve, they can be elicited incrementally and iteratively. But what ever way to appear they need to have a home. They need a reason for being here. They need to enable a capability to be available to the user.
