Customer Reviews

Managing Iterative Software Development Projects

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is the ultimate reference, the PMBOK on managing software development projects. Whereas other books are limited to one particular viewpoint or cookbook method, the authors in this book tap from many years of experience with different approaches. The only point of critique is that the book could probably also have been written on half as many pages. But this drawback is entirely compensated by the thoughts and best practices presented and the way they are presented, the experiences shared, the examples given and the method proposed here.

The book appears to be a well written text about doing RUP iteratively. Unfortunately, I am not doing RUP or UP. The editorial review on Amazon quoted from the back cover that it would be appropriate for agile methodologies and not just RUP. While that may be the case for some chapters, for a significant portion of the book, I do not believe it is so. We are implementing Scrum and this book is not the best source to help me with that. It is too heavy and UP specific. I will be returning the book. Don't be turned off from the book if you are doing RUP since it may be for you.

I am moving from iterative development to iterative project management. This book is really wonderful and explains in detail the processes, the risks, deliverables. It will help anybody who wants to think "iterative" development.

BTW, it will also help you talk to dinosaurs and explain your approach to project management. A big help.

As agile software development approaches are more and more adopted in software development organizations, the title of this book from Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence seems to be right on the target. The book contains two major parts. The first gives an overview of iterative project management. It defines the concepts, discuss controlling and gives tips to assess your readiness for iterative project management. The second is a more detailed walk-through to the planning and management of iterations at different levels. It provides also information on how to assess the results of iterations, discuss the relation between iterative project management and project scales. The last chapter is dedicated to the information needed to start your first iterative project. Finally, appendices provide material on use case development (the topic of a former book from the same authors), templates, checklists and an example of 50 pages.

The process behind the book is widely based on the RUP approach; thus practitioners of a "pure" agile approach could be disoriented by the content. However, this book contains very valuable and pragmatic material about managing iterative projects that could be used in any iterative context. It will also provide good transition information towards an iterative process for project managers that operate in a more traditional organization. With 600 pages, it is a not an easy book that is quickly digested. It will nevertheless helps you to improve you grasp on iterative project management, whether you read the book sequentially or you pick sections according to your current project management questions.

Overall I thought this was a very good book for learning about how Iterative Development projects are supposed to work, what the advantages are and why a company might want to use this sort of methodology. The authors did a nice job of avoiding too much methodology jargon as well. Sometimes it seems these books are written only to be read by other methodology academicians, but that wasn't the case here.

I have since shared this book with several other people in my company, including one not even in IT, and they have also found it helpful. So if you are also facing challenges in educating your broader company about how agile development techniques should work, this might be a good place to start.

On the other hand, it is quite long and wordy. Most people will not have the patience to wade all the way through this book, so before I shared it, I went through it with a hilighter and told my people to just read the yellow parts. :-)

My only other beef with the book was that it seemed entirely targeted at internal projects, or for software where the users were all internal. Nowadays that is almost anachronistic. My teams mostly work on web development either for B2B users or for the general public (B2C), which means that statements like "make sure your requirements are reviewed by the business" are of limited value. Our business is our clients and their consumers. If you are working on public web apps, just keep in mind that whenever these authors say "business," they mean "your web consumers" and you should be fine.

First it's important for me to say I already became a fan of the authors when I read their excellent book "Use Case Modeling". As I said in my review(still valid to this date): "If you can buy only one book about use cases, then buy this one !!!!". They created a masterpiece about RUP Requirements discipline.

Well... now, with the release of "Managing Iterative Software Development Projects", they did another SW Engineering best-of-breed book about Project Management(with RUP and also other agile approaches!).

With agile and iterative approaches becoming the mainstream in SW processes (just see how IBM, Borland, Microsoft, Compuware and other SW products companies jumped the agile bandwagon), this book is a must read for SW Project managers and leaders.

The book is divided in three parts:

- Part I: The Principles of Iterative Project Management -> this is for the project managers which still don't know the values and principles of iterative development and why they work better than waterfall approaches. As I already read a lot of books about iterative development( one of the most important books to understand the benefits of agile development is "Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide" by Craig Larman), I read this part very fast :-).

- Part II: The meat of the book -> Here we can break these in two sections: In chapters 6, 7, 8 the authors explain how to create a Layered Approach to Planning and Managing Iterative Projects. They explain, respectively, how to create: The overall project planning, the evolution and phase planning, the iteration planning. The second section(chapters 9, 10 and 11) deals with important considerations about assessments and retrospectives, how to scale for small or large projects, how to get started with Iterative Project Management.

Part III: Appendices -> Here we have an introduction to Use-Case Driven Development and some Outlines, Templates, and Checklists for the artifacts discussed in the book. But the best section is Appendix C, which contains a very nice example of an ATM project(based on their previous book, which also is good to give a sense of continuity) with: Overall Project Plan for Version 1.0 , Evolution 1 Plan, Evolution 1 Iteration Elaboration1 Plan and iteration E1 assessment.

Just to finally finish: If you need to manage iterative SW development projects, buy this book and also "Agile Estimating and Planning" (another excellent book about the subject) by Mike Cohn!

Kurt and Ian, if you see this, thank you for another excellent work!!! Maybe in the future we will see books about other disciplines. For the next my vote goes to: SW Architecture and Analysis and Design :-).

I can understand how iterative agile methodologies aren't always welcomed in a formal corporate IT structure. But using the guidelines in Managing Iterative Software Development Projects by Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence can add just enough formal structure to keep the benefits and comfort the traditionalists.

Contents:
Part 1 - The Principles of Iterative Project Management: What Is Iterative Development?; How Do Iterative Projects Function?; Controlling Iterative Projects; Are You Ready for Iterative Project Management?
Part 2 - Planning and Managing An Iterative Project: A Layered Approach to Planning and Managing Iterative Projects; Overall Project Planning; Evolution and Phase Planning; Iteration Planning; Iteration, Phase, and Project Assessments; A Scalable Approach to Managing Iterative Projects; Getting Started with Iterative Project Management
Part 3 - Appendices: A Brief Introduction to Use-Case Driven Development; Outlines, Templates, and Checklists; Examples
Index

The biggest mark against typical agile methodologies like Extreme Programming is that they appear to come across as a chaotic work effort designed to get things out fast with little documentation. That's an unrealistic oversimplification, but unfortunately that's the perception all too often. The result is that organizations stick with waterfall-style development activities, and things take far longer (and may not ever deliver the intended system) than they should. Bittner and Spence take the iterative style of development (short iterative releases, constant user feedback and re-evaluation) and put some of the more traditional project management checks in place. The iterations are mapped out ahead of time, and the project is managed as a whole, with "sub-projects" contained within. While not necessarily much different than the popular agile methodologies, it comes across as a more controlled formal process, without losing the flexibility of the iterative method of software development. If you're a small, informal team to start with, this might feel like overkill and a move back to "the Dark Side" of project management. But for those in formal IT shops that spend far too much time analyzing and not enough time actually building software, this could be the perfect approach to becoming agile.

Iterative Projects are a challenge to plan. They require additional attention to planning and re-planning that traditional projects 'do' but not in forced regular intervals - iterations. This is a solid reference overview of the processes, templates, roles, etc.

Some day... a reference will exist with more details on what was actually planned in iterations of a real project. Address the reality versus the concept.