Trade-offs

A really good way of improving the exchange of information between clients and suppliers is to try to get them to tell each other about trade-offs. Every business has them.

When you're buying a car or a coat - do you buy the cheapest? Thought not. So what's wrong with the cheapest car? What's wrong with the cheapest coat? OK let's make a list: horsepower, features, handling, quality, style, having to wrestle someone for it in Primark.


Primark - Pile it high... (pic courtesty of adotjdotsmith)

Do you buy the absolutely best quality? No. The most possible horsepower no. Do you by any chance instinctively understand that when it comes to cars or clothes there are whole bunch of trade-offs? You can have cheap, but it won't be fancy. The faster it goes, the less likely it is that you can get a baby seat in it (or get baby vomit out out of the carpet). You can have top-quality cashmere haut-couture but it won't be cheap and you probably won't want to wear it when you go to the gym. You can have cheap, but don't expect it to fit.

Get the idea? It isn't just one trade off, there are lots. You don't really understand anything, until you understand the tradeoffs. And it's more complicated that that. In software development they're very often three way rather than two-way trade-offs.

I took part in a panel discussion where one of the other members - Chris Heilmann - said that whenever he starts talking to clients about writing software, he draws three circles and labels them "Cheap", "Fast" and "Good". Then he tells his clients that they can have any two - that's at least a start at getting his clients to understand that there are trade-offs.


Expensive? Yes. Stylish? Yes - but maybe not the right thing for the beach...(pic courtesy of Tammy Manet)

When we first started doing Agile training, we had great difficulty explaining the difference between the Agile concept of stories and terms used in other design methodologies such as "Use cases". Things got much easier when we started to talk about stories as "negotiations" (or trade-offs) between scope, priority and effort. Stories are dynamic. Each story is an exploration of a possible trade-off. When you start to think about things like this, you begin to realise what an improvished, static and inadequate thing a specification is.

For more about trade-offs, read from Gerald M. Weinberg - Secrets of Consulting.


For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)