Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2007 - (Page 62)

d11ambler_p4ma 9/10/07 11:40 AM Page 62 The Agile Edge Figure 3: Control points throughout the lifecycle. reducing technical risk. And architecturally difficult requirements often prove to be highpriority business requirements, so there is very little reordering of your initial requirements. The Construction phase proves to be the vast majority of the effort where you build the system and the focus of the Transition phase is where you release the system into production. Explicit demarcation of the software development lifecycle phases provides business stakeholders with the opportunity for formal checkpoints into the team’s progress. For everyone still afraid of the waterfall boogeyman: Just because these checkpoints are “formal,” doesn’t mean that they have to be dysfunctional. It could be as simple as inviting a few extra senior stakeholders to your end-of-iteration demo and wearing a pressed shirt that day. More importantly, explicit phases enable stakeholders to take a phased-based approach to overall funding. Many organizations can’t tolerate the iteration-based “allowance” approach to funding the project described earlier, yet setting the budget at the beginning of the project is clearly an unnecessary business risk that should be avoided. An effective compromise is to fund each phase at a time, and the secret to making this work is to streamline the funding request effort as much as possible. Agile Governance Works It shouldn’t be a surprise that Agile projects are easier to govern than traditional projects, although it clearly isn’t what some traditionalists want to admit. Agilists work closely with stakeholders on a daily basis and the stakeholders have active roles on the team. Agile project teams provide stakeholders with concrete and useful information as to what they’re doing, and provide stakeholders with the ability to easily direct teams appropriately. If your organization wants to improve its ability to govern IT project effectively, perhaps you should really focus on adopting Agile approaches to development on all of your software development projects. Once you’ve done so, I suspect that many of your governance problems will have gone away all on their own. DDJ Scott is a DDJ Senior Contributing Editor, Practice Leader Agile Development with IBM Rational, and author of several best-selling books. He can be contacted at www.ambysoft.com/ scottAmbler.html. 62 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l November 2007 http://www.rallydev.com/ddj http://www.ambysoft.com/scottAmbler.html http://www.rallydev.com/ddj http://www.ambysoft.com/scottAmbler.html http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2007

Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Smart Compilers - But Smart Enough? Conversations Grid-Enabling Resource-Intensive Applications Distributed Computing: Windows and Linux Adobe AIR: Desktop/Web Convergence Transparency on Demand Reusable Associations Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2007

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