Page 72 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Unit 5: An Agile View of Process

Agile projects are not controlled by conformance to plan but by conformance to business value. Notes
“The major problem with planning,” say Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt (1998), “is that
plans are virtually always wrong.” If we accept the notion of constant change and turbulence,
then plans are still useful as guides, but not as control mechanisms. In high-change environments,
plans—and the traditional contracts that are derived from plans—are worse than useless as
control mechanisms because they tend to punish correct actions. If we deliver a working software
product, with features our customers accept, at a high level of quality, within acceptable cost
constraints, during the specified time-box, then we have delivered business value. Developers
don’t get to say, “This is valuable.” Customers do. Every three to six weeks, customers tell
developers that acceptable business value has been delivered—or not. If it hasn’t, the project is
cancelled or corrective action is taken. If it has, the project continues for another iterative cycle.

We may look at the plan and say, “Well, because we learned this and this and this during the
iteration, we only got 23 of the 28 planned features done.” That is useful information for planning
our next iteration, but not for control. When we started the project three months ago, we only
planned 18 features for this last cycle, and half the features we did deliver were different than the
ones in the original plan. We accept that talented people, who are internally motivated, who
must work in a volatile environment, who understand the product vision, will do the best they
can do. If they don’t conform to the plan, the plan was wrong. If they delivered business value,
then whether the plan was “right” or not is immaterial.

!
Caution If they conformed to the plan and the customers aren’t happy with the delivered
business value, it doesn’t matter that they conformed to the plan.

An entire generation of project managers has been taught, by leading project management
authorities, to succeed at project management by conforming to carefully laid-out, detailed task
plans. Conformance to plan means locking ourselves into a outdated, often irrelevant plan that
some project manager cooked up in great haste (which, of course, precluded talking to developers)
18 months ago when the world was different. Conformance to plan may get a project manager
brownie points with the tightly wound project management authorities, but it won’t deliver
business value in volatile, high-speed environments.

An exploration perspective contrasts with that of optimization. Take, for example, the use of
schedule deadlines. While a schedule may appear to be a schedule, each perspective utilizes
dates as a control mechanism in different ways. Optimization cultures use dates to predict and
control—they view schedule as achievable, along with the other objectives, and see deviations
from the plan as poor performance. Exploration cultures, however, view dates much differently.
They basically see dates as a vehicle for managing uncertainty and thereby helping to make
necessary scope, schedule, and cost tradeoffs. Exploration cultures, to be sure, use dates as
performance targets, but the primary focus is bounding the uncertainty, not predicting dates.

Balancing Flexibility and Structure

It would be very easy to either “plan everything” or “plan nothing,” but the really interesting
question is how to juggle the two, how to define the context narrowly enough to get something
meaningful done, but not so narrowly that we fail to learn and adapt as we go along. The
fundamental issue remains one’s primary perspective: to anticipate or to depend on resilience
and responsiveness. Aaron Wildavsky, a social scientist, writes about this issue and offers an
example of the difference between Silicon Valley and Boston. Basically, he believes, the reason
Silicon Valley is the primary technology center of the world is that it depends on its resilience
to be able to respond to rapid change, whereas the Boston crowd leans more heavily toward

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