Controlled Agility

摘要

Like many other developers of commercial software, the Software Productivity Center's (SPC's) product development team is challenged to provide enough flexibility in its development process to accommodate shifting requirements due to market pressures. At the same time it is expected to maintain enough control of its projects to ensure the regular on-time delivery of product releases. The difficulty is to satisfy these conflicting needs and still deliver a meaningful feature set that satisfies both internal and customer business requirements. While most agile methodologies deal very well with shifting requirements, they have a tendency to be somewhat open ended with respect to predictable delivery dates. This is fine if you are engaged in exploratory development, or your software is deployed in environments where it is cheap and easy for you to make frequent changes to the code as you refine your product's functionality. Unfortunately, for most developers of commercial software, this is not the case. The open-ended nature of these agile methods presents problems to management when you try to constrain development within predictable delivery schedules. This paper presents an experience report explaining how SPC's approach married an agile-like development process with change management best practices, allowing us to accommodate an evolving feature set during development, and to consistently deliver regular on-time updates to our products.