The first step when managing dependencies

What do you do when the project you are working on has a lot of dependencies? I just spent some time looking for advice on the Internet. I searched for “manage dependencies agile.” Google gave me “About 5,540,000 results”. Wow, a lot of writing on this topic is already out there.

With so much information already available, I will keep this short and sweet. When managing dependencies, your first action should be to ask, “how can these dependencies be eliminated?” Managing dependencies is an overhead operation that takes time and effort. Eliminating a dependency ensures it doesn’t cost anything in the future.

Here are some quick ideas for eliminating dependencies:

• remove the work creating the dependency
• move the work to a different team that wouldn’t have the dependency
• in software, you can use a mock or a stub to simulate the dependent piece already existing

Feel free to forward this blog entry, or a link to the video, to anyone struggling with managing dependencies. The recommendation is obvious yet not widely used.

Please leave a comment if you have other ways to to eliminate dependencies successfully.