Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Change Is Good…Or is It?
Different agile teams take different approaches to change. Some teams follow the lead of Extreme Programming and are very accommodating of change within an iteration. These teams will allow their customer or product manager to introduce changes directly within an iteration, effectively swapping the development of one feature for the development of another.
Other agile teams take the advice of the Scrum process and decide that it is important to keep change out of an iteration. For these teams, once the team commits to developing a set of new features during an iteration, no changes are allowed. Plenty of teams have succeeded with each approach, so it is too simplistic to say that all agile teams need to adopt the same attitude toward change. However, I do think that there are clear advantages (and disadvantages) to each approach. What I'd like to present in this article is a set of guidelines that teams can use to determine how they should view change: Should they allow changes within an iteration, or should they seek to avoid it?
A significant obstacle to establishing highly productive software development teams that I observe frequently is that most organizations cannot establish a set of priorities and leave them alone for any significant period of time. Many struggle to set priorities and hold them constant for even the short two- to four-week iterations favored by most …
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