“The only thing that is constant is change” ~Heraclitus

This proverb is often told to individuals (like me) who love to see a project follow a plan from start to finish.  I’ll be honest, I’m a planner. I’m thrilled when the plans I put in motion actually work out the way I intended.  These are the moments when I retort, “the only people who like change are wet babies.” However, more often than not, something changes, which throws off my entire plan and forces me to not only revisit Heraclitus’s proverb but also rethink my plan entirely.

Building software, particularly in Agile development, is no exception. In fact, the second principle of the Agile Manifesto states that developers should: “Welcom[e] changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”

It would seem, then, that this principle would disappoint any planner working on an Agile team. Why bother creating a development plan if you know the stakeholders are going to change their minds about their desired features at the last minute? While we’re on this subject, if the requirements are going to change from one iteration to the next, why bother estimating the project at all?

When learning something new, people often try to relate the new information back to something they already know in order to help make sense of the new concept or idea.  As a psychology major now working in the software world, I’ve found myself relating a lot of what I’m learning back to the psychological theories and concepts I learned in college.  Therefore, it is no surprise that upon reading The Twelve Principles of Agile Software, I’ve discovered that many of their principles map to organizational psych concepts.

Agile development theory approaches software development holistically.  I believe this is one of the reasons Agile projects have become so successful.  Rather than merely focusing on skill development, Agile methods foster leadership skills and teamwork among members of the development team itself, as well as between the development team, the project owner, and the stakeholders.  One avenue for this is to unify the development team and project owner with the common goal of achieving stakeholder satisfaction.

The first principle states, “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”  The question I had upon reading this was what do the authors mean by the term satisfaction?  When thinking about satisfaction, most people think of outcome satisfaction, or the ultimate outcome of something, in this case the functionality of the delivered software project.  Process satisfaction on the other hand, refers to the level of satisfaction associated with the method of developing the software, or how much the stakeholders enjoy the software development process.

After spending the past few weeks working with the Agile projects in QSM’s historical database, I’ve become interested in Agile Development Theory, particularly due to its popularity. While spending days at a time examining our database, I’m left with numerous data-driven questions. Therefore, I thought I would take this opportunity to write a series of Agile-related blog posts.

QSM’s database contains over 100 Agile projects from the U.S. and abroad. The projects include a variety of application types and their top three programming languages were JAVA, C++, and VB.NET.  Seeing this, I thought it might be interesting to examine the “typical” Agile project according to our data.

So what does the “typical” Agile project look like? For consistency purposes, I limited the sample to IT systems projects completed in the last six years. I measured the Duration, Effort, Average Staff, and MTTD at various project sizes to see how they compare.

Below are two figures that give demographic information about our “typical” Agile projects: 

This scatter plot shows the individual Agile projects compared against QSM’s Business Agile trends.

Imagine we are starting a new Agile project, one that is key to our competitive position. We need to deliver in six months. Our competition is already in the market, so we must at least match them on features and quality. This project is twice as large as other projects we've done recently, but the project is important enough to put our best people on it. Two teams stand out - their velocity is consistently high on the projects they've completed. If we put those teams together, their combined velocity should do the trick! Well, maybe it's not quite that easy. In Predictable Change - Flexing the Five Core Levers of Software Development, Dr. Andy Berner from QSM introduces the key metrics used to predict what it takes to do a new project and some of the issues you'll encounter when moving from Agile iteration planning to planning new projects and releases. 

Dr. Andy Berner is a senior software engineer at Quantitative Software Management, Inc. Previously, Andy worked at IBM where he was lead architect for enablement and strategy in the Ready for IBM Rational program. Andy has done extensive consulting on software development methods and tools, recently focusing on integrations of tools and team members throughout the software lifecycle. Prior to IBM, Andy spent 11 years at EDS. In a former life, Andy was a research mathematician and teacher. He now helps QSM customers improve their ability to manage and control their projects. 

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If you were unable to attend our webinar, Shifting to Agile Methods - The Keys for Long-Term Success, a replay is now available. 

Changes to the software development process, such as moving toward Agile methods, must demonstrate sustainable results over time versus just short-term wins.  There are two keys to reaching long-term success that should be considered up front – the new process must be repeatable and measurable. 

In this session, AccuRev’s Chris Lucca and QSM’s Larry Putnam, Jr. explore these two keys to success.  

Specifically, they cover:

• The state of software development projects yesterday versus today and the impact to the software development process
• The techniques and tools that can help a team to build a process that is repeatable and scalable, even across a distributed team
• Which metrics and measurement processes are important to measuring the results and improvements of implementing repeatable and scalable processes
• How to use metrics to estimate project schedules, resources and reliability, and monitor project progress and forecast completion
• Ways to benchmark the results at project completion for time to market, cost performance and reliability – all of which provide the business case for continued investments in technology and repeatable and scalable processes

View the webinar replay.

View all recordings of all of our past webinars.

On Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:00 PM PM EST, QSM will co-host "Shifting to Agile Methods - The Keys for Long-Term Success" together with Accurev.

Changes to the software development process, such as moving toward Agile methods, must demonstrate sustainable results over time versus just short-term wins.  There are two keys to reaching long-term success that should be considered up front – the new process must be repeatable and measurable. 

In this session, AccuRev’s Chris Lucca and QSM’s Larry Putnam, Jr. will explore these two keys to success.  

QSM has been collaborating with Forrester Research on a report focused on the current state of Agile development. Prior Forrester data shows an adoption rate of about 38% among developers in 2010 and continuous growth YoY in the last three years. However few have really scaled it to the enterprise level. Have you?

To get a better data representation, we encourage to participate in this survey. Tell us about your current and future Agile development plans. This survey will ask questions like: 

• What are the expected and achieved benefits of Agile?
• How is Agile being adopted?
• What is Agile actually improving in organizations and how are results being measured?
• Which Agile practices are the most commonly used? 

To participate in this survey, click here.

More Agile resources from QSM:

• Estimating Agile Projects Webinar 
• Beyond the Hype: Thoughts on Agile Development

I'm pleased to make available "Beyond the Hype," a presentation that I delivered at the 2011 Practical Software and Systems Measurement Conference.  "Beyond the Hype" is a metrics-based analysis of Agile development that both confirms some “common wisdom” and contains a few surprises.  Does Agile really have higher productivity?  How does Agile quality compare with traditional development?  What are Agile’s demonstrated strengths and weaknesses?  How can you size and track Agile projects?  Using Agile project data from the QSM Database, "Beyond the Hype" addresses these and other questions about Agile.

Read the full presentation here.

On Thursday, September 30th at 1 pm EDT, QSM will host a Webinar on Agile Estimation Methods.

You can view the replay of this webinar here.