Agile Software Development

There are not that many people who like micromanagement. No surprise that the fear of day to day micromanagement scares some people off the agile processes. That is not the only way agile processes can look micromanaging. All the agile processes employ the idea of iterative and incremental planning on pretty much every possible level. Scrum Product Owners can change the project priorities every 14-30 days, in Extreme Programming, the usual iteration length is just one week. Naturally the possibility for the rapid shifts in the priorities can make it difficult for the team to design and build a good architecture and work at a full possible speed.

Bridgekeeper: “What is the velocity of an unladen swallow?”
King Arthur: “An African or European swallow?”
Bridgekeeper: “Huh? I don’t know that…”

- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

One of the most important metrics of an Agile team is its velocity. (No, you don't have to give the receptionist a stopwatch and do laps around your office.) In project management terms, velocity is the amount of work that a team can complete in a specified period of time.

Agile processes recognize and try to effectively use the fact, that software creation is a difficult and not very predictable process. Therefore quite often teams applying agile processes end up with the not completing all the committed product backlog items by the iteration end. Teams just starting to employ Scrum or XP can sometimes end up with half of the items being not completely done. Naturally in such a situation people are tempted to finish the uncompleted stuff as soon as possible. Some think about extending the iteration length for a week or two, some think about marking the item half-done, adding half of its size to the team velocity and continuing with it during the next iteration.

All the agile software development processes are iterative. Iterations are used in order to release complete increments of software within predictable periods of time and get customer or pseudo-customer feedback early. Different processes recommend different iteration lengths. Scrum is very strict in this sense and requires exactly 30 calendar days long iterations. This period of time is considered being a typical amount of time that product owner can allow the team go independently without the external control. eXtreme Programming brings the idea of frequent customer feedback to the extreme level and advocates for shorter iterations down to one week long.