AGILE IN ACTION

Agile estimating and planning techniques are a combined subject that holds particular interest for me. Over time, I've experimented with various techniques and some worked better than others. Estimation is always a lot of 'fun'! How many times do project managers, stakeholders, indeed whole corporations expect estimations to be accurate within a negligible tolerance? Too often. Worse still, they hold you to the original estimates even when they've been empirically modified. But planning is where I see it all go wrong too often, and sadly usually from the outset. Whether it be as simple as not employing adaptive planning techniques where plans consequently take root and become inflexible and pointless, or more subtly because of the way the problem domain or user stories are disaggregated to produce an emerging design with low cohesion and tight coupling.

Typically agile software development combines incremental and iterative techniques to deliver functionality early and often. Many people believe that iterative development is the same as incremental development. In fact, they are different but entirely complementary practices for developing software.