Some of the things I read about estimation in the agile community appear to me to be insane. Story points and the reasons that they are the preferable unit of estimate is one of those things. Before you call me a heretic, and burn me at the stake for my blasphemy, and my castigating your…
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Agile Versus Whatever
In a number of posts over the last few months, Glen Alleman (Herding Cats) has been saying that Agile comparisons to “waterfall” or “predictive” are bogus, because the practices that they compare themselves to are simply BAD practices or anti-patterns in the domain of project management. While I don’t disagree with Glen in the slightest,…
Agile Risk Mitigation
Before we talk about whether agile practices provide any benefits toward risk mitigation or risk reduction, we really need to talk about the nature of risk in a software development project or process. In any discussion of risks, there are any number of attritbutes by which we can classify or characterize risks, but in order…
Agile Value Delivery
Agile practices claim to delivery greater value to the customer. This claim is based on agile tendencies to deliver software capabilities more frequently, which in and of itself, means that the customer starts realizing value from our efforts sooner. OK – this one is obvious. Traditional phase gated life cycles effectively require you to do…
Agile Predictability
Predictability is probably the least hyped benefit of agile practices. It is not sexy or fun, nor does the team gain from it, in a positive way. But the team does benefit from it, from a management perspective. The benefit of a predictable software delivery process is realized in three ways: Rational Planning Process –…
Agile Productivity
One of the hyped benefits of agile software development practices is increased productivity. It is also the benefit that I am most skeptical of. Software productivity is notoriously difficult to measure. That is because there are no relatively standard units of measurement of output. Martin Fowler said this in 2003, and as far as I…
Agile Benefits
Of course there has been loads of hype about agile in the software development community. Lots of folks have now been certified as Scrum Masters. I have been involved in agile transformation since 2004/5 when I had a proprietary methodology forced on me from above. Said methodology was brought by a “Management Science” consultant, who…
Vision, Strategy, Policy
Sometimes it seems like we get “hung up” on moving forward with some initiative, because we cannot separate vision from strategy, and strategy from policy. I want to posit some definitions of these terms that might help us to keep making progress. One of the reasons that we conflate these is that they all have…
Premature Plan Optimization
In PlanningSequencingElaboration , I shared my realization that sequencing is less a simplification of scheduling, than scheduling is an optimization of the plan around a time constraint. Here are some typical variables and constraints that a project plan must contemplate: 1) Cost – can we complete the necessary work and deliver the expected value at…
A Recipe For Dissatisfaction
When scope has little why because it is so obvious then the who doing the how don't get it, how will match the what and not the why – a recipe for dissatisfaction.