Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CAUTION
Be aware of your full customer community, even if some are less vocal and
less involved early in the project.
As it turned out, the two subsystems that had been deferred ended up being
more complex than we thought, driving the schedule six months beyond
our target.
LESSON 2
Pay attention to all the work you commit to—including work that is viewed
as low priority, especially if it has not yet been fully analyzed.
I now want to present the three “how-to” techniques supporting the intent of
specific CMMI practices while also supporting agility. I will also explain
more about how these techniques could have helped us on DART. In the sec-
ond technique, you will hear more specific information related to why we
failed to adequately prepare Al for his Agile collaboration challenge and how
this technique could have helped.
8.10 Technique 1: 10 Percent Rule
Sutherland 10 Percent Rule
Jeff Sutherland, one of the co-founders of Scrum, has stated when training
ScrumMasters that Scrum teams should allocate about 10 percent of project
people's time for the analysis and development of the next Sprint Backlog.
In hindsight, if I had followed this rule, I now believe we might have had a
more successful project outcome on DART. Plan to involve your develop-
ment team in each incremental planning session, since they have some of
the best information regarding prioritization based on their current incre-
ment work.
8
Why didn't I do what I should have done and reprioritize work to free up
some of Al's time to analyze these subsystems earlier? There were multiple
factors
influencing my
decision.
I believe now if I had followed the 10 percent
rule, the result could have been completing the overall project in less time.
8. Refer to the story about “Diddling in DOORs” in the LACM case study in Chapter 3. This experience
learned at LACM contains a similar message to Jeff Sutherland's 10 percent rule.
