Estimation & Agile Development… Plan and Control Agile Projects
While at the IBM Rational user conference in Orlando I (Dan Galorath) attended a briefing by Scott Ambler, practice leader of Agile development for Rational. He had an interesting (and refreshing) perspective on Agile and Agile planning.
I have always cringed when I heard Agile people saying essentially.. “forget planning.. we are Agile… we will solve tomorrow’s problems tomorrow” That may be fine for tiny projects, but how do major projects get justified and funded without some kind of estimate and plan? And how do managers control them?
Scott spoke of satisfying governance requirements by generating estimates and plans within the agile environment. He also recognized that the business people need to understand business costs and business value so cost versus value tradeoffs can be properly made. He also pointed out that systems architectures and other constraints should be agreed upon up front. He said that architecture should be determined in the first couple weeks, not left for months.
Scott showed some interesting survey results showing that agile projects that are colocated are far more successful than those that are distributed.
This was timely since so many people are talking about Agile these days. Additionally Galorath Analyst David DeWitt has produced a paper on detailed Agile estimating with SEER and applied it with a customer. Send an email to info@galorath.com to receive a copy of David’s paper. And feel free to comment here about your Agile successes and failures and how project planning and control impacted them. And how SEER for Software has been involved.
And to those who have decided Agile means don’t plan or do any of the things that have helped to turn software from an art to an engineering discipline… Please plan and control your Agile projects. They will be far more successful if you do. Yes, the planning is somewhat different than Waterfall projects. But Agile doesn’t mean forget planning.
And to the question.. do I need SEER if I do Agile development…. a resounding yes.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
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Project Prediction Infographic
Here is an interesting quote from a fairly recent Forrester Report on Agile.
“More than half of enterprises that aren’t already using Agile processes are interested in adopting them. But many of these shops aren’t completely clear about what Agile adoption really entails. As a result, shops that adopt Agile processes are often surprised by the amount of change that’s required. See the August 29, 2007,
“The Truth About Agile Processes” report.
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,41836,00.html
To be assured – we are all going to be hit with more questions about this “PROCESS” (quotes and large caps are intentional)