Comments on: The Critical Path on Agile Projects

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:51:02 +0000

A more loosely drawn one. I don’t want to ever get too caught up in thinking that each of my estimates is accurate so it’s just an informal layout showing a likely sequence of the features to be built. It sometimes helps find dependencies.

By: matt

matt — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:07:00 +0000

Hi Mike,

In this posting, you refer to a network diagram. Are you using that term to refer to a classical CCPM Project Network or rather a more loosely defined relationship diagram inter-relating features?

Thanks,
m

By: Kirk Myers

Kirk Myers — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:41:30 +0000

Mike, The article Tamara has written adresses many of my questions.

Thank you.

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:19:20 +0000

Hi Kirk–
Tamara Sulaiman has written a good article on “Agile Earned Value Metrics” that is on the Agile Journal website. You can see it at http://tinyurl.com/2ruhzw (which expands into a big URL).

By: Kirk Myers

Kirk Myers — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:00:01 +0000

I am working on a new project that entails agile software development. Are there any examples that discuss how scrum correlates to an Earned Value System ?(EVMS)

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:28:23 +0000

Hi Sandra-
If you and the team think it will help then I’d suggest giving it a try. I’d keep it pretty lightweight and use it mostly for discussion along the lines of “OK, if we finish this by Thursday (let me put a mark here on the whiteboard) that let’s us start the other on Friday and that means we just have to do such-and-such before the end of the iteration next Thursday…” I suspect if you try that a few times you’ll find that drawing it was useful as a way of providing context to your discussion but that the discussion, not the chart, was the value.

However, I’m going to play psychic for a moment and guess that you have fairly long iterations (3-4 weeks) and probably have some large product backlog items. If so, there may be two other options that will work better for you:
–considering smaller product backlog items
–considering shorter iterations

By: Sandra McLeod

Sandra McLeod — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:47:22 +0000

One issue we’ve been struggling with is trying to identify the dependencies among stories in the sprint. On paper, the set of stories we have committed to look great, but in reality, there are dependencies that sometimes cause our tasks to be blocked and our stories end up being way off our original estimates.

Is it “wrong” to use something like an informal Gantt chart during sprint planning to help us to “see” what the dependencies and timing requirements are and what would need to be done at a higher priority in order for our stories to be able to get to “done” by the end of the sprint?

Our purpose isn’t to plan out the sprint, but rather to make the dependencies and timing requirements visible. Would you still discourage us from doing this? Does it give it a different spin if we called it a “feasibility” chart? Or a dependency chart?

By: mike

mike — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:55:03 +0000

Adi–It may indeed be the case that it will be necessary to use MS Project to identify some dependencies; however, it shouldn’t be the ScrumMaster who does this. The team is responsible for figuring out how they’ll do the work. This principle of self-organization is key to how agile teams perform so well. The team should figure this out rather than rely on the ScrumMaster. And I still contend that in most cases the critical path will be easy for a team to find without a tool. In 12 years of running Scrum projects I’ve never seen a team need a Gantt or PERT chart to figure out the critical path within a single sprint. (It’s been occasionally necessary across a release plan but never one sprint.)

By: Adi

Adi — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 23:47:29 +0000

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