Effective Software Project Management

Traditional Versus Agile Projects

Traditional projects are clearly defined and their requirements, functions, and features well documented and understood. Despite the fact that this specificity is unlikely to happen, this leads the project manager into the development of a complete project plan with all resources scheduled to tasks and tasks scheduled to specific time frames.

Agile projects do not have a complete requirements document in place and can discover it only by doing the project. This leads the project manager to shy away from speculation and develop a plan only for the known requirements. This just-in-time planning approach is driven by the discovery and learning of missing or mis-specified functions and features. The solution unfolds through the iterations that define the agile approaches to projects. Agile projects tend to be high risk compared to traditional projects. The inability of the customer and the development team to completely and clearly define requirements is a clue that something is different and needs to be treated differently. The unknowns are the factors driving the risk higher.

In the end, the traditional and agile approaches converge on the same set of artifacts. They just arise at different points in time along the project life cycle. There is one major difference between the two sets of artifacts. The traditional approach would have identified and planned for a number of deliverables that either changes after being deployed or were never done at ...