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Using Multiple Life Cycles in Combination on a Project
December 20, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management, Project Lifecycle Phases
Using Multiple Life Cycles in Combination on a Project
By Johanna Rothman
I’m not a purist. I use whatever tools make sense for the context I’m in, and when it comes to organizing projects, I use whatever life cycles–in whatever combination–make sense to me. In response to a mailing list query, here are ways I’ve used life cycles for a few projects.
Let’s assume you’re collaborating with another organization. You would like to define an architecture sooner rather than later. You’re nervous about an architecture that emerges from implementing some features–you want a little more planning than that.
So you decide to prototype the architecture for a little while in the project (an iterative life cycle), and then move into implementing by feature (incremental life cycle). I’ve used this combination life cycle with and without timeboxes.
Is this a perfect life cycle? Nope. But it beats the uncertainty of a waterfall.
I’ve used another variation on multiple life cycles, especially for larger projects where the project staff or project management didn’t want to or know how to use an agile life cycle. This combination life cycle has two incremental pieces. The developers (the top of the picture) use staged delivery.
The testers, on the bottom of the picture, use design to schedule. This way they keep up with testing as much as the life cycle will allow, and if they are forced to finish the project early, they have “finished” all the testing to date. They don’t have partial bits of tests–they know what they’ve done and have not yet done.
I’ve also used Agile life cycles (Scrum with different size timeboxes) in combination on a project.
Here, the developers in the corporate location had a series of features that were big. I did suggest they break the features apart into smaller chunks for ease of estimation and implementation, but they didn’t want to. The remote team was responsible for smaller chunks of features, and were having trouble estimating the size of their stories. They decided to move to 2-week timeboxes to reduce what they were trying to estimate.
Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.
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