Interrupting a developer considered harmful
Dmitri Zimine has a hypothetical story of how interrupting a programmer for a two hour emergency request needed to close some sale can actually waste two weeks.
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Agile development is supposed to be about agility. It's supposed to mean that you can change plans quickly. It's not supposed to be about rigid programming teams who are so slavishly devoted to their Two Week Plans that they can't rearrange their schedule a bit to serve the needs of the customer.
Has nobody noticed that the example was about a sales oriented interruption and not about something needed for an ongoing project of an existing customer? Most business people will misunderstand this form of agility. They will interrupt programmers any time just to make a prospect happy. But prospects are not yet paying customers and therefore the damage is real.
Sales and development (in some cases R&D) should be separated. A good idea is to have people available for technical pre-sales support. But these should not be the same guys who develop the company's product or work on another client's project.
