Failure is NOT the mother of success

I’ve got a BIG quesiton in one of my job interviews, which was like this: “How to convince your client that agile software development will work under a relatively low budget while still keep the deliverables in high quality to meet all of the requirements?”

A tough question indeed. Gurus of Software Engineers have been writing piles of books about it. My brain was full of different ways to address this concern that in the end resulted in a not well formatted answer.

Business people concern the budget the most, on top of everything, anything else. They make a budget on development software not only for resolving some of their problems, but also for getting more in return. If the apporach cannot meet this basic requirement, then it is not acceptable, no matter how good the “product/service” will be like in the future.

The image above illustrates the missing point I forgot to add to my presentation. I should have used this visual aid to give the audience a better understanding on how agile software development can help reducing the budget down to an acceptable level.

So if I were to have the chance to do it all over again, I would definitely focus my words on the points mentioned there in the image, emphasizing some of the agile methodologies that will:

help client find the “right solution” of what’s to be there, from a vague imagination to a visible picture, so that they know “why to start” and “when to finish” – so they can decide how much money to spend;
minimize the initial development cost by avoiding a pinnacle in the first stage;
cope with changing requirements and cost less to keep going, cuz they will inevitably change their minds, sooner or later;
support low cost sustainable development while still keep the working software in high quality during the on-going development

And I hope that will convince them more and finally win their trust.