Effective Software Project Management

The Extreme SDPM Strategy

What do you do if what is needed is not clearly defined? What if it isn’t defined at all? As I just indicated, when you enter the world of the Extreme SDPM strategy, you enter the world of research and development—a world where goals are not clearly defined and, of course, the solution is not clearly defined either. In fact, the solution might be quite elusive. The bottom line, however, is that the project is critically important to the enterprise. The goal must be clarified and a solution must be found. Perhaps, you have tried to force fit the traditional approach into these situations and found it flat out doesn’t work. Extreme SDPM strategies are designed to handle projects whose goal can be only fuzzily defined or really not defined at all. Figure 31-1 illustrates the generic relationship between the Extreme software development process phases and the project management phases.

Figure 31-1. Extreme SDPM strategy

Building a business-to-business (B2B) Web site with no further specification is an excellent example of a project in need of an Extreme SDPM strategy. Much like the early stages of an R&D project, building the B2B Web site starts out with a guess, or maybe several guesses. As the project commences, the client reflects upon the alternatives chosen and gives some direction to the development team. This process repeats itself over and over ...