vesterberg.se

Having the right process control model when you develop software is of great importance. When I look back it seems that many of the projects I have been involved in have been very complex and most of them have had many areas of unpredictability. They have not at all been close to an assembly line. Treating them and controlling them like you would an assembly line would be frustrating and plain wrong. Sometimes projects are like assembly lines, we walk the path we have walked before and we know what will happen. We can predict the road ahead and estimate the time it will take correctly. But most of the times the projects are not like that. We estimate time, but that is just a guess and in the end the developer feels guilty because he could not estimate better.

We live in a fast changing and evolving time and we can only accept it. Requirements will change while we are building and the needs of management and customers will change. There is no time for the technology to settle, but in order to have competitive edge we constantly use bleeding edge technology. Wrong time estimates and unreached goals is not the developers fault. We must have a model that resembles reality.

I have been using the Agile approach for quite some time and lately been looking into Scrum. Scrum is a Process Control Model that fits the above scenario. It describes itself as an empirical model of process control and advocates a paradigm shift from the traditional view of process control modelling.