Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed

Appendix D. Tools for Balancing

D1. The Spiral Model Anchor Point Milestones

The spiral model anchor point milestones were initially developed in a series of workshops by the USC Center for Software Engineering and its government and industrial affiliates. They addressed two primary problems:

1. The lack of well-defined milestones for evaluating and tracking progress while using the spiral development model.
2. The need for a set of common commitment points to use as the phase boundaries for the COCOMO II cost and schedule estimation model.

The milestone content and rationale were initially documented in 1996.¹ They were subsequently adopted as the phase gates in the Rational Unified Process,^{2, 3, 4} the USC Win Win Spiral and MBASE process models, ...