Perhaps the biggest benefit from the widespread adoption of agile development in the public sector is getting away from the fallacy that a world of changing requirements and technology is best handled by thoroughly defining and locking down the requirements.

The amount of effort wasted in exhaustively collecting and documenting requirements for software over the past few decades is mind blowing, and actually quite upsetting. Not because understanding what people want from a system is a bad thing, but because writing them down and pretending that they a) are all true, b) represent what the user actually needs and c) won’t change is at best a fool’s errand. Fortunately, the world has moved on and not only is agile development based on meeting user needs now widely embraced by the public sector, it’s also expected and mandated.

Because Livestax makes it easy to abstract the user experience away from the underlying services and tools, we’re excited about how well it works for building and iterating digital services. Rather than building big, monolithic solutions to big problems, an approach of creating simple tools that meet user needs, and having them work together in one place, allows for not only rapid development but also faster iteration.

We’re excited about how we and our clients will meet more user needs using Livestax. If you’ve got some thorny problems and you’d like to discuss whether Livestax can help, drop us a line.