Effective Software Project Management

The Planning Phase of an Iterative SDPM Strategy

The primary focus of any Iterative, Adaptive, or Extreme SDPM strategy is to discover a complete and acceptable solution beginning with a partial solution. The indication that this is the situation you find yourself in comes when you and/or the customer know that functions or features are missing because the current solution just doesn’t feel right to the customer. Working together with the customer, the project team will plan the iterations to discover those missing features. The Iterative SDPM strategy has two variations: Iterate on the complete solution or iterate on those parts of the solution requiring additional features.

Figure 19-1 illustrates the parts of the project management Planning Phase and the iterative planning phase.

Figure 19-1. The Planning Phase for the Iterative SDPM strategy

Suppose that based on the results of the requirements gathering phase, you reach the conclusion that the solution that suggests itself is not going to meet customer needs. There is something missing from the requirements documentation. It could be any number of things. The most likely scenario is that the requirements list is not complete. Second, the requirements may not be completely defined. That points you to missing features, and that is the focus of the four iterative SDPM Strategies discussed in this chapter. The challenge is ...