"Unit of work" here is the unit for software delivery, and it can be decoupled from how any individual developer plans and executes whatever software they are delivering.

Product requirements are a hypothesis for creating business value, and the only way to test that hypothesis is to actually demonstrate a slice of that value in a way that's legible to all stakeholders involved.

This post is a nice articulation of this: https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09/17/the-common-sense-un...

▲

discreteevent 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That post seems to say that the unit of work must be something customer facing. It even qoutes Kent Beck talking about "Weekly delivery of customer-appreciated value".

There is so much great software in the world that wasn't delivered like that and couldn't be delivered like that: Unix, Microsoft Word, Postgres, AutoCAD, The JVM, Google search, Windows, AWS, Robotics, Calculators ....

The software industry seems to have been captured by contractors who used to deliver CRUD apps and now want to make the whole world in their image and likeness.

▲

danparsonson 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the point though, thinking of delivery in terms of slices of business value naturally leads one to break application development along those lines. It's very convenient for the stakeholders to see progress mapped out like that, but it tends to lead to fragile and poorly-architected systems that are difficult to change in the future (and therefore not lower-case A agile).

	▲	sriharis 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Slicing a cake across layers is about prioritising value and mitigating the risk of building the wrong thing. Most product and feature requirements are hypothesis for creating value, unless that hypothesis has already been validated. > It's very convenient for the stakeholders to see progress mapped out like that It's important for the business to validate product value. This is not just progress anxiety. Crafting software to perfection is ultimately a waste if it doesn't provide value to the business or customer. If we are sure we're building the right thing, we can risk more, and spend more of our time building the thing better. Build scrappy first, build confidence in value, and then craft to perfection. The slices of cake aren't built in isolation. Every time a slice is being worked on, it is integrated back. The cake analogy falls apart here, because cakes (and houses) aren't nearly as malleable as software. We have opportunities to refactor it every step along the way, and change its shape. Yes, sometimes we refactor independent of business value, and I think that's essential too. I don't think the idea that's presented is to have absolutely every slice be vertical, and business / customer facing.