Last Responsible Moment

Last Responsible Moment definition

• Last responsible Moment is a coding principle.
• Last responsible Moment is a strategy of not making a premature decision but instead delaying commitment and keeping important and irreversible decisions open until the cost of not making a decision becomes greater than the cost of making a decision, the Last Responsible Moment.

Last Responsible Moment purpose

• There may not actually be such a thing as a perfect decision, but there certainly is an optimal time to make it.
  • There is a cost of deciding and a cost of deferring and the last responsible moment sits perfectly at the intersection.
  • It will be hard to always perfectly time your decisions, and only you will know where that point is, but the key is to understand that there is an optimal decision making point.

Last Responsible Moment practice

• Options Thinking lead us to invest time and money in delaying decisions to a time where we know the most about it; the extreme application of the Decide as late as possible principle is the concept of Last Responsible Moment, the optimal point of the trade-off between the available time for a decision and the need to complete a story or a task.
  • The last responsible moment is the instant in which the cost of the delay of a decision surpasses the benefit of delay; or the moment when failing to take a decision eliminates an important alternative.
  • For example, failing to provide a public HTTP API may make you lose an important customer, forcing you to publish an unfinished work.

More informations for Scrum Testing

More informations for the Scrum PSD certification here.