Agile Development: What to Expect as a Client

How Agile Works in Practice

Agile development breaks your project into small chunks called sprints (usually 1-2 weeks). Each sprint has a specific goal: build a feature, fix a set of bugs, or implement an integration. At the end of each sprint, you see working software — not just designs or documents.

This is fundamentally different from "waterfall" development where you define everything upfront, wait 3-6 months, and hope the result matches what you asked for. With agile, you see progress every week or two, and you can adjust direction based on what you learn.

The most important thing to understand: agile isn't about delivering less documentation or skipping planning. It's about planning continuously and adapting as you learn more about what the software actually needs to do.

Your Role as the Client

Agile requires more client involvement than traditional approaches — and that's a feature, not a bug. Your involvement is what keeps the project aligned with your actual needs instead of drifting toward what the developers assumed you wanted.

Practically, this means: attending a sprint planning meeting every 1-2 weeks (30-60 minutes), reviewing the demo at the end of each sprint (30-60 minutes), being available for questions throughout the sprint (via Slack, email, or brief calls), and making timely decisions when options need to be chosen.

The most common cause of agile project failure isn't technical — it's an unavailable client. If you can't commit 2-3 hours per week to the project, agile will be frustrating for both sides.

Handling Scope Changes

Requirements will change. You'll discover features you didn't know you needed. You'll realize some planned features aren't actually important. This is normal and expected — it's the whole point of agile.

The process for scope changes is simple: add the new requirement to the backlog, prioritize it against everything else, and it gets built in a future sprint. The trade-off is explicit: adding something means deprioritizing something else, or extending the timeline.

What agile doesn't mean is "unlimited scope at the original price." Good agile projects have a defined budget and timeline, and scope changes are managed within those constraints through prioritization, not by adding more time or money.

What "Done" Looks Like

An agile project doesn't have a single dramatic "launch day" — it's a series of incremental deliveries that build toward the complete product. Many agile projects deploy working software to production within the first 2-3 sprints, then add features continuously.

The project is "done" when you've achieved your goals — whether that's all planned features built, the budget is spent, or you've decided you have enough to launch and will iterate post-launch. Each sprint produces working, deployable software, so you always have something usable even if the project ends early.