software projects: have your cake and eat it?

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 in this article about software development projects – 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.”

2 thoughts on “software projects: have your cake and eat it?”

  1. agile adoption fails in a “fixed project situation”

    i saw an interesting article on infoq.com.the term “fixed bid” is used in the article, but this article applies to another “fixed project situation”, too, i.e., where the resources are fixed, and there’s a specified, promised feature scope and a…

  2. lean: development is not manufacturing

    the conclusions of lean manufacturing theories are not necessarily valid in the domain of (software) product development.there’s a reson why it’s so difficult to fix time, budget, and feature scope all at once in a software development project.so what’…

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