Delivering High Quality Software Development Projects On-Time, On-Budget
Today’s IT organizations must do more with less in more compressed timeframes than ever before. Some of this pressure has undoubtedly been brought to bear by the business side of the organization as a consequence of previous IT project overruns and cost blowouts. The infamous 1994 Standish CHAOS Report states that less than 26% of IT projects are rated as successful and about 25% of all projects are cancelled before completion. This is not a good track record for the IT software development business.
A growing consensus of bodies agrees that a major contributor to this poor success rate is the lack of predictability in traditional heavyweight or ad-hoc software development processes. These approaches almost inevitably lead to late scrap and rework, significant time overruns and more dollars required to deliver an acceptable level of software to the sponsors.
Therefore, an alternative approach to developing software that provides a more predicable outcome with quality software is needed.
An Agile Approach
Contrary to popular belief, Agile software development is not an idea from the dot-com era. Agile methods, in their various forms, have been around since the late 1980’s in the guise of the Unified Process and have expanded to include more than 8 approaches to Iterative and incremental development. Thus, Agile is a collective term for the many different modern approaches to software development. Over the last 10 years, there has been significant experiential and practical input to the Agile movement from some of the best minds in the industry.
Empirical evidence suggests that adopting an Agile approach can:
• Significantly increase project predictability
• Reduce Time-to-Market by 25%-50%
• Dramatically reduce defects
• Increase productivity
The Agile Challenge
One of the strengths of Agile methodologies is also one of it’s weaknesses: The huge volume of input and approaches can overwhelm the original concept. As one process size never fits all, Agile infers a huge knowledge of software development process and software engineering to be able to sort the chaff from the wheat. In practical terms, it means that the process engineer or Agile mentor has to have an enormous experience base to create even the simplest process for the smallest project.
Managing requirements: This is acknowledged as the single most challenging aspect of any project and Standish has stated that changing and incomplete requirements are the single most contributing factor to project failures. A key concept of Agile is iterative requirements management that enables requirements to evolve, in a managed fashion, throughout the project. Although highly desirable, this aspect is hard to implement as it impacts on multi-dimensional issues such as team collaboration and significant business-user involvement.
Fixed price contracts: An ongoing attraction of traditional methodologies is the focus on completing all the requirements up front to get sign-off and project estimation. Unfortunately, this has been proven over time to be a fool’s errand as there is an acknowledged “cone of uncertainty” at the beginning of any project which undermines all efforts to fully define the requirements upfront. Agile methods can address this in a number of ways; including wide band Delphi estimating or multi-phase projects.
Process scalability: An image exists that Agile processes are for small applications and can’t scale to mission critical, enterprise scale projects. This is true only to the extent that some Agile methods, like XP, were not designed to address large projects. However, the fundamental tenets of Agile such as iterative development and incremental delivery have been applied in a rigorous manner with the Unified Process (on which RUP & EUP are based) on some of the world’s largest IT projects. It is simply a matter of applying the appropriate weight of process for the project under consideration.
Where Zeus Consulting, Inc. helps
Zeus Consulting, Inc. has significant experience in software development as process engineers, Agile mentors and enterprise application architects. We have worked on large and small projects in several sectors including Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, and the Judicial Branch of Government.
We create tailored Agile software development processes appropriate for your specific project that bring together the necessary software development industry best practices to ensure an optimal outcome for your project.
We also provide practical hands-on mentoring and coaching of your project team to ensure that the project moves smoothly through each phase and iteration to a successful completion.
Standish CHAOS Report
Software Magazine Product Coverage (Jan 15, 2004)
Standish: Project Success Rates Improved Over 10 Years
The 10th edition of the annual CHAOS report from The Standish Group, which researches the reasons for IT project failure in the United States, indicates that project success rates have increased to 34 percent of all projects. That’s more than a 100-percent improvement from the success rate found in the first study in 1994.Asked for the chief reasons project success rates have improved, Standish Chairman Jim Johnson says, “The primary reason is the projects have gotten a lot smaller. Doing projects with iterative processing as opposed to the waterfall method, which called for all project requirements to be defined up front, is a major step forward.” The Standish Group has studied over 40,000 projects in 10 years to reach the findings. Project failures have declined to 15 percent of all projects, a vast improvement over the 31-percent failure rate reported in 1994. Projects meeting the “challenged” description—meaning that they are over time, over budget and/or lacking critical features and requirements— total 51 percent of all projects in the current survey.“People have become much more savvy in project management,” Johnson says. “When we first started the research, project management was a sort of black art. People have spent time trying to get it right and that has also been a major step forward.” Most of the challenged projects in this year’s survey had a cost overrun of under 20 percent of the budget, a threefold improvement over the first 1994 study. Of all projects with cost overruns, including failed projects, the average project cost overrun in 2004 was found to be 43 percent—versus an average cost overrun of 180 percent in 1994.
The 2004 CHAOS report, entitled “CHAOS Chronicles,” found total U.S. project waste to be $55 billion, made up of $38 billion in lost dollar value and $17 billion in cost overruns. Total project spending was found to be $255 billion in the 2004 report.
In 1994, The Standish Group estimated U.S. IT projects wasted $140 billion—$80 billion of that from failed projects—out of a total of $250 billion in project spending