Agile development is a hot topic for many project managers. It is the latest management fad, following total cost of ownership (TCO) and total quality management (TQM). (Remember those?)
So here is a little bit of heresy: Agile development methods are not for every project.
To use agile methods effectively, one must understand what they offer -- and what they don't.
Agile methods make one guarantee: that your system will always work, for the functionality that has been built. Agile methods (stakeholder involvement, short development cycles, automated testing) ensures that the features you build will work as you expect. Even as you add new features, your automated tests ensure that old features still work. Thus, you can always send the most recent version of your system to your customers.
But agile methods don't make very promise. Specifically, they don't promise that all of your desired features will be available (and working) on a specific date. You may have a list of one hundred features; agile lets you implement those features in a desired order but does not guarantee that they will all be completed by an arbitrary date. The guarantee is only that the features implemented by that date will work. (And you cannot demand that all features be implemented by that date -- that's not agile development.)
Agile does let you make projections about progress, once you have experience with a team, the technology, and a set of features for a system. But these projections must be based on experience, not on "gut feel". Also, the projections are just that: projections. They are estimates and not guarantees.
Certain businesses want to commit to specific features on specific dates, perhaps to deliver a system to a customer. If that is your business, that you should look carefully at agile methods and understand what they can provide. It may be that the older "waterfall" methods, which do promise a specific set of features on a specific date, are a better match.
No comments:
Post a Comment