Agile Planning -- Challenges

The key concept: Well planned software project planning should plan like this: undergoing with aggressive process date, over-promised feature sets, and unrealistic project plans that not included technical skills. However, the fact is backfired with reality. This article can show how an agile planning approach can help.

Get trouble when traditional Project Planning start

Usually, the business stakeholders usually have these three things in common for each project:  i) Scope:  specific problem they need to solve. ii) Time:  Timeline the project need to solved by. iii) Cost:  estimate how much it’s worth to solve the problem.

With Agile project planning is different approach to solve the specific problem. Without define every detail, agile planning can plan incrementally, starting with the most important features. The development team can then determine which of those features they can complete in a specific timeframe or “iteration” within the range from 2 to 4 weeks.

Each iteration allows the user to choose additional features (or enhancements to existing features) and to prioritize the remaining work. The development team can learn from each previous iteration to improve their estimating. If they complete all of the features agreed to, the team can start working on the next priorities as determined by the user. If not completed the features, it’s the user who gets to decide which ones to defer until later.

The key for approach is communication and rapid feedback. The user communicates in the form of clear, priorities needs. Development communicates in the form of estimates for specific, measurable functionality, which is critical in the prioritization process.  Finally, there is rapid feedback to both teams on how things are going. The development team delivers working software at the end of iteration, even if it's just a skeleton of the finished product.  This tight feedback loop is a big part of why an agile approach works better.

Reference –
Agile software Planning, user Articles, viewed Saturday 6th August, 2011 http://www.extremeplanner.com/articles/Agile-Project-Plannipng.html