Agile Development is killing Customer Value

Kiran Addepalli
3 min readOct 3, 2020

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Yet another daily standup with each team member providing a status of what they did today and I responding with a standard question, “are there any impediments”, and we move on. In the middle of everything, my mind wandered to Neil Gaiman and what he said about comics as one of the most difficult books to write.

As a child, I remember eagerly waiting for the newspaper and frantically flipping over to the last page. It had a strip of 3 or 4 panels of my favorite character — The Phantom! I had to wait a few days before I could cut and transfer the strip to my own little book, nicely dated and sequenced comic book. Every two or three months, my book would be popular among my friends because no one else was doing this. Hey, I had a product!

What Neil explained about comic books and the process puts software development to shame.

Credits: Lee Falk, Ray Moore and Kind Feature Syndicate
  • The Writer has the main plot. There are characters. The creator has a general idea of the personality and traits of the characters. The writer is a big picture and visionary guy.
  • A Penciller or director brings the story to life sequencing panels and pacing the reader.
  • An Inker or colorist brings lighting effects, color pallette and darkness — literally mapping actors with their inate characteristics.
  • Then comes the Letterer, the “voice” behind the characters. Every expression is represented with a different font and style. Each actor has different style in font and size.

What makes it incredibly difficult is the collaboration and creativity has to be at the best. Every Panel is a self-contained story. All the roles must align. One panel off, and the plot is lost and the reader’s interest is lost.

The publisher expects every copy to be sold!

After almost 25 years of developing software, I still walk into meetings where the purpose of the meeting is not clear. We speak of defects and endless discussions on CRUD operations. A well-spoken, well-meaning scrum master plays the game of mediating the card game with the team settling on 5 story points from 3–3–5–5–5!

My Agile trainings littered with jargon between Initiative, Theme, Epic, Feature, Story and silly games with blind folded men trying to avoid paper plates — Lava is what they tell you! Let us not get started on SAFE — Value Streams, Release Trains, Architectural runways …

Agile doesn’t teach us:

  1. What is my value as a developer or team member when you put the overall goal of the product. Why is it so difficult — a colorist is directly contributing to the sale of the comic.
  2. There is no bloo*y sequencing of stories. Lets call them “panels”- each panel is a story and the the stories have to line up to a release (the book!).
  3. Throw away bad panels! Do not “celebrate” badly written modules. The worthless weight will drag your product offering.
  4. A badly written book will not be picked up by a reader (or their references). A badly written software will not excite customers no matter how many retrospective meetings you have!

Software development can benefit if we just look around other domains where collaboration leads to results and not just land up on a Jira board!

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Kiran Addepalli
Kiran Addepalli

Written by Kiran Addepalli

Executive Leader| Data and Identity Champion| Innovation and Product Builder

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