Tag: Agile

The transition to agile management approaches for Software development has introduced even more challenges for cost estimating teams, especially as they support long-term budget development and program execution. Learn about how Unison Cost Engineering is internalizing an agile program into TruePlanning.

In the federal government, budgets require a multi-year planning cycle. Therefore, any effort to reduce the uncertainty of future year program costs leads to better and more defensible budgets for those years. But Agile programs focus on near term workload and activities with only limited future planning cycles identified. Future cycles are only activated as their start date nears. So any model-based cost estimate or predictive analysis for the budget needs to be flexible, responsive and adaptive to the daily dynamics of Agile program planning and execution.

Software project failures coupled with rapidly changing business needs are forcing organizations to revisit the way they go about building software. Agile development has emerged as one possible solution to the woes of the software industry.

Agile development requires a mind shift on the part of both the developers and consumers of software to accept the reality that things will change over the course of the project.

Neither the agile philosophy nor the CMMI is prescriptive as to how the software is developed, but there is no reason the two cannot be successfully applied in tandem.