Agile baseline - Agile Earned Value

Agile Earned Value

Posted in Process on 09 27th, 2009 | your response

Paul Solomon has an article “Agile Earned Value and the Technical Baseline,” in this months SoftwareTech, a publication of The Data & Analysis Center for Software. DACS is a US Department of Defense Information Analysis Center (IAC). This site and the journal is a source of software development news and processes application to a variety of domains and contexts. DoD is one of the world’s largest consumers of software – COTS and purpose built.

DCAS is the holder of the Gold Practices content. These documents are a good starting point for anyone looking for guidance on processes for developing and managing mission critical software systems.

This article, like all of Paul’s articles provides insight into the subtle and sometimes complex world of Earned Value. In this case in the presence of Earned Value.

A core problem in commercial projects is “feature deferral.” This means “we’ll not be able to give you this feature in the current iteration (if you’re using Agile), but will get to it in the next iteration.” The question becomes:

How is this deferral reflected in the reporting of Physical Percent Complete?

Paul has a suggestion. Even in the absence of the discipline of Earned Value, this is always an issue. So if you’re in the enterprise software development business, subscribe to SoftwareTech and read how software intensive systems are built in the presence of government contracting. Then see if some of the methods to increase the probability of success can be applied to your non-EVM project controls method.

On our software intensive programs (flight avionics), Work Package performance and Rolling Waves are a nice fit for Scrum. Maintaining the PMB (Performance Measurement Baseline) can be done with Planning Packages for out year rolling waves – IF the level of detail needed to define the content of the Planning Packages is carefully considered before placing them on baseline.

This is a constant “tuning” effort and the role of our staff as Program Planning and Controls.

As well there is an article of “Dispelling Myths about Earned Value Management,” that must be read by everyone claiming to have a simpler or alternative approach.

Original post created by: Herding Cats