Manage It!

Use Release Criteria

Release criteria are either met or not met. You aren’t partway to meeting a criterion—you haven’t met it. You’ll find that this binary approach helps you when you’re discussing the state of the software with senior management. If you say you’re partway there, they hear that you’re done. If you say you haven’t met the criterion, they hear you’re still working.

With your team, discuss progress toward release criteria during your project team meetings. Combining this with a look at the project dashboard (see Chapter 11, ​Creating and Using a Project Dashboard​) lets the entire team assess the project’s state of doneness during the entire project. If you have a formal system test phase, use the criteria as part of the testing ...