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Can Agile Teams Have a Design-First Approach to APIs?
- mindcrime 4y agoIf you read the Agile Manifesto[1], you'll find that nowhere inside does it say not to do design, nor is it prescriptive with regards to how much design to do. The reality is, each team gets to (or "has to" if you prefer) decide how much design (particularly up-front design) is appropriate for their project. For some projects it may be that spending two days on design is right. For others maybe it's two months. I doubt the right number is "two years" for any project, but you never know. But I do know that the point of the Agile Manifesto was never to say "don't do design and architecture work". Rather, it was to say something like "Don't get too caught up in design and architecture up-front or you might wind up designing the wrong thing, since you won't really know if what you're building is the right thing until the users can see something concrete and provide feedback." That's my own personal paraphrase of course, but I think it's pretty close to the spirit of the thing. Anyway, yeah, if your team feels that spending some time on designing API's up front, then by all means, do it. You have my permission! Tell your boss, your scrum master, your consultants, whoever tries to argue with you, that I said so. I can tell em to fuck off, since I don't report to any of them. :-) [1]: https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/