By Adriana Beal
Agile sweet-spot
- Small, self-organizing, collocated team consisted of few core members with agile experience
- Single product owner available for face-to-face communication
- Unstable or emergent requirements
- Group of end-users (or surrogate users) available to provide frequent feedback
- Either small project, or one with few dependencies for which value can be obtained from early delivery of working software in an evolutionary model
- Software reliability is not critical (agile approaches allows requirements to “emerge” during development, which, specially in systems of large size and high complexity, may affect reliability, or require costly and time-consuming changes over time).
Project A: single-purpose web-based application
Project B: complex order-fulfillment system replacing legacy with multiple points of integration
Agile prioritizes the timeline over virtuosity. For an online application that isn’t mission-critical, a “good enough solution” with short time-to-market, that you can evolve later, may be more valuable than waiting for the perfect product to be ready.
For a project with plenty of interdependencies, high complexity and dependent upon software reliability, more detailed upfront requirements and architecture definition may be critical for project success.
That doesn’t mean complex projects cannot adopt agile practices — only that for this type of project, teams need to be more careful about which ones to adopt or reject. Some kind of hybrid method may be ideal here (for example, with the architectural foundation being identified and developed using a more traditional approach while user-facing features are prioritized and build on top in an agile manner).
Project grid used to identify project profile
Adapted and expanded from the project sizing grid from “Business Analyst: The Pivotal IT Role of the Future”, whitepaper from Management Concepts, Inc, licensed to Hewlett-Packard Company (Oct 2007). HT to Otto Fox for suggesting what became the “designated product owner” criterion.
Edited to add: check also this handout for another approach to classifying projects based on uncertainty and complexity levels.