Rapid development calls for rapid decision-making. Agile practitioners sometimes make the mistake of assuming that an Agile environment doesn’t have any spare time built in for research to inform those decisions. It’s not so. You’re actually more at risk for wasting time when you don’t research.

Research can take many forms, and a lot of insight can be gained very quickly.

Research is for grownups.

A big part of Agile culture is empowerment and self-determination. But developing software costs real money. The hard truth is that not every cool-sounding idea your brain spawns deserves to come to fruition. The ideas that should be developed are ones that research shows will advance your organization’s business goals – you know, the reason they pay you to come to work.

Research should be proactive.

It doesn’t matter what kind of software development environment you’re in. Which is smarter – a survey to find out if the Ultimate Extremely Cool Tool would solve a problem and/or delight users? Or a survey to find out why users won’t use the Ultimate Extremely Cool Tool your company spent four months developing? (If you’re unsure which one of these is smarter, you might want to take a personal day and read a couple of months worth of Dilbert comics to gain some clarity.)

Objectivity is a must.

Research should be done by people who don’t have as much skin in the game as the people writing the software. It needn’t – and indeed shouldn’t – be done by the development team itself, but by research professionals on staff or outsourced. Why? The same reason they don’t let judges preside over cases where their kid is a defendant.

Testing is a crucial form of research.

Don’t skip test-driven research – the lack of it could come back to bite you in the…area where you don’t want to be bitten. I wrote more about this recently. But don’t just take my word for it. Alberto Lumbreras has written some great blog posts about the subject, here. You know the old adage: “Act in haste, repent in Sprints 15 and 16.”