Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Design

Agile on a Fixed Budget


I'm often asked how you could possibly do agile software development given a fixed budget. The good news is that, yes, in many cases, it is in fact possible to work under these sorts of restrictions and still be agile. Because your budget isn't the only potential restriction you may face, this month I explore strategies for dealing with the common constraints your business stakeholders may choose to put on software development teams.

A common concept within the project management community is the iron triangle (Figure 1), which says that of the three factors of resources, schedule, and scope at least one must vary, otherwise quality will suffer. Quality suffers because of shortcuts and/or poor decisions made by technical staff in order to conform to the constraints placed upon them. Ideally all three factors should be allowed to vary, giving you the greatest management flexibility, but that rarely occurs in practice. I explored this concept in detail in my March 2003 column "Iron Triangle: Something's Gotta Give" (www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184414962).

Figure 1: The iron triangle.

An implication of the iron triangle is that although your team may face some constraints, you still have some room to maneuver if some factors are not constrained. Although many people say they are worried about how to manage a "fixed-price" or "fixed-estimate" project, their real concern is how to manage a "fixed-everything" project. This is the worst-case scenario, so let's not start there. Instead, let's explore strategies for how to work when each individual factor is allowed to vary. With this knowledge in hand it becomes much clearer what management options you still have for your given situation.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.