From the course: Agile Foundations

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Start with the highest value

Start with the highest value

From the course: Agile Foundations

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Start with the highest value

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- The very first principle in the Agile Manifesto is that our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. The key thing to think about with this principle are the words priority and valuable. So what does it mean to prioritize high-value software? Strangely enough, one of the answers to this question starts in the 19th century with an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. When he was in his garden harvesting peas, he noticed that 20% of his peapods produced 80% of his peas. He was an economist, so he compared this ratio to the wealth distribution in Rome. There he saw that 20% of the population owned 80% of the city's land. So this 80/20 ratio is now known as the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle. 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. Now, if you fast forward to the 1990s, a consulting company called the Standish Group published a report that said that a majority of software projects were failing. That's…

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