Development progress is considered Value?
Good afternoon, community. I'm currently leading a Scrum team, and we're working on a project called "Digital Debit Card Provisioning." This project involves: A customer logs into the organization's app and finds the GPay wallet button, where they can automatically provision their Digital Debit Card to the GPay wallet. They can then make purchases from their mobile phone.
The development process for this entire workflow takes three months so the customer can see the value. However, the development team is generating development increments in each iteration (two weeks) to integrate all the code by the end of the quarter. Are these increments considered value? Because the value for the customer will be perceived at the end of the three months.
Perhaps, to be usable, you need to have more Increments done and integrated. However, can you demonstrate progress and get feedback and validation that you're on the right path? Even if you don't have a fully usable product, if you're able to gather and respond to feedback and confirm that you're on the path to building the correct, fully usable product, the team is still creating value.
What you described is a waterfall project. I cannot tell you how many Microsoft Project Plans I built or followed that showed the development building one component at a time but not having anything usable until the very end with the grand integration.
In the agile movement, the idea was to produce something usable in small increments and gain feedback from stakeholders that it was going in the right direction. The term stakeholder is used instead of customer because sometimes what is built is not going to be used directly by the customer but instead by another part of the development group. For example a backend API designed to return specific information that will be used for other things. Think of an API that returns the Android version and mobile device type as an example for your work.
If you are writing code that is not capable of showing value to someone then you are just writing code. If you are producing code that has value, someone should be able to view the inputs/outputs and give feedback on whether it is going in the right direction. I do encourage you to find ways of producing code that can be shown to your customer to solicit feedback so that you don't get to the end of the 3 months and have them say "yeah, that isn't exactly what we need".
Business value can only be realized when your product Increment is released to the customer or end user.
However, the development team is generating development increments in each iteration (two weeks) to integrate all the code by the end of the quarter. Are these increments considered value? Because the value for the customer will be perceived at the end of the three months.
No, and whatever those "iterations" are, they're not Sprints. In Scrum, the whole point of a Sprint is to create at least one Done, finished increment of immediately usable product, and in a timeframe of no more than one month. If it takes longer, the validated learning loop is becoming attenuated and empiricism is being compromised.