Question

"Prioritization Against Time Constraints" Please respond to the following:

Imagine you are working on a project and the release date is predetermined by upper management. Determine if you can use Agile release planning, and explain why or why not.

Suggest strategies on how you can increase productivity and mitigate risks in the situation described in Part 1 of this discussion.  

Answer 1

For the following case, there are at the most two available options right now. To request a later release date due to time constraint and to use everything in your arsenal and essentially run through the process of implementation rather than combing through it systematically.

Both the above options provide challenges for us as none of these is the ideal situation. Not only will the decision of asking for an extension not sit well with the upper management, following agile development can essentially have its own set of challenges and failures in implementation. But since we are going to have to choose, the decision to go with agile development seems to be the most appropriate one right now.

For agile planning to work, we need to be able to design the product, implement it, test it and monitor it effectively to be able to determine if the product can be released for use. For all of the following phases except the designing/planning stage and the quality control/monitoring stage we cannot use agile development essentially otherwise we’d just be sacrificing the project’s integrity and quality.

Therefore, in implementation and testing we can use agile development to rapidly make an implementation and test it using unit sized blocks data and testing it side by side while one department works on the following, the other tests the implementation for issues and presents it to the third department that then works to correct these issues and sends it to the fourth team, to facilitate assembling them into one solid unit product.

Depending on the competency of the teams involved, the quantity and requirements for the staffing process and effective leadership skills and management practices, agile development can be pulled off in such a situation respecting the time deadlines we have as the bottleneck.

In order to create productivity, the processes need to be optimized by essentially following lean methodology which will allow the process to create ;lesser waste and implement faster, moreover, delegation of tasks to be run in parallel while one unit creates one solution and the other unit creates the second solution can allow for a modular approach which can totally save time.

Mitigating of risks include the six-step process where the testers can essentially follow the following scheme of identity, classify, quantify, plan, act and repeat, These steps allow for a more structured approach to an otherwise somewhat random process and allows the project to essentially create lesser wastage, reduce risks and allow for successful mitigation.