Emergent Design

#30. Emergent design is an advanced practice for Microsoft Business Application team experienced in Scrum.

What is emergent design?

When we practice emergent design, the development team designs the solution to meet the users’ needs just before we build the feature.

The opposite of emergent design is up-front design. This is when the solution is designed in the Design phase of the project, usually by a solution architect, based on the requirements specification published in the Analysis phase, and before any software has been developed.

Advantages of emergent design

Compared to designing all your features up-front near the beginning of the project, emergent design offers several advantages:

1. The development team are working closely with the users so they have first-hand experience of their current pain points and future needs so there is less reliance on written requirements specifications.
2. Once we’ve designed the solution, we can estimate it. The estimates are based on building previous features by this team for these users, and the estimates enable the product owner to determine whether the feature is valuable enough to build or defer.
3. Our experience building working features for our users means that our designs are much more likely to meet their needs and our estimates are much more likely to be accurate than designs and estimates guessed at during a Sure Step project.

Listen to Scrum Dynamics podcast episode 30 or watch the video on YouTube to find out why I love emergent design and how I used it on my recent project to find the best possible design for integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with Adobe Campaign.

Winning Agile Projects
Winning Agile Projects is a five-week program for 10 partner professionals involved in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform sales, pre-sales, practice leaders, architects and analysts that will help them qualify agile opportunities, pitch the benefits of an agile approach, create compelling agile proposals, estimate agile applications and write agile contracts. Apply today: https://customery.com/winning