Pareto's law is more commonly known as the
80/20 rule. The theory is about
the law of distribution and how many things have a similar distribution curve.
This means that *typically* 80% of your results may actually
come from only 20% of your efforts!
areto's law can be seen in many situations - not literally
80/20 but certainly the principle that the majority of your results will often
come from the minority of your efforts.
So the really smart people
are the people who can see (up-front without the benefit of hind-sight) *which*
20% to focus on. In agile development, we should try to apply the 80/20
rule, seeking to focus on the important 20% of effort that gets the
majority of the results.
If the quality of your application isn't life-threatening, if you have control
over the scope, and if speed-to-market is of primary importance, why not seek to
deliver the important 80% of your product in just 20% of the time?
In fact, in that particular scenario, you could ask why you would ever bother
doing the last 20%?
that doesn't mean your product should be fundamentally flawed, a bad
user experience, or full of faults. It just means that developing some
features, or the richness of some features, is going the extra mile and has a
diminishing return that may not be worthwhile.
So does that statement conflict with my other recent post:
"done means DONE!"? Not
really. Because within each Sprint or iteration, what you *do*
choose to develop *does* need to be 100% complete within the
iteration.
