software projects: have your cake and eat it?
By ingvald. Filed in EN, SW dev |Tags: agile, project, quality
would you like to have your cake and eat it, too?
in my opinion you actually can’t; you’re not able to make absolutely sure that a project is on budget (resources), on time (delivery date), and have all the planned features with high quality, all at the same time. there’s always a risk, and you can only control any 2 out of the 3 factors at the most. If you try to control all 3 factors at once you are most likely sacrificing the quality of the features, and thus you’re not in control over the features anyway.
Scott W. Ambler makes a few interesting points about software development projects in an article – i’ve selected the quotes that’s most interesting (to me) below.
- “the only true measure of progress on a software development project is
the delivery of working software. “ - “Agile teams choose to produce
potentially-shippable software at the end of each iteration, providing
concrete and visible feedback to their stakeholders as to their actual
progress. “ - “… the majority of stakeholders prefer
this sort of tangible evidence of progress instead of intangible
numbers. “ - “… the majority of our stakeholders aren’t
really interested in whether we’re on schedule or on budget. “
“…. In August 2007, Dr. Dobb’s ran a survey exploring
how people define IT project success, and we found that 80 percent of
people preferred to focus on producing a good return on investment
(ROI) than being under budget, and that 62 percent wanted teams to ship
their systems when they’re ready to be shipped rather than forcing
adherence to a schedule. “
- “… the priorities are to spend
the money wisely and ship quality systems. “ - “… shipping high quality software is
more important than being on time and on budget” - “… instead of measuring progress against your plan, … you should instead be focusing on ensuring ROI and product
quality. “
“The agile practices of implementing requirements in priority
order and allowing requirements to evolve throughout the lifecycle
ensure greater ROI, and agile practices such as test-driven development
(TDD) and refactoring promote greater quality.”
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