This is from a recent project at a multinational retail company. The company is using a corporate RUP adaptation since a few years back. However most projects have interpreted this in a way that mostly resembles a waterfall approach, having clear hand-offs and not being very iterative.

My role in this project was configuration manager. They were particularly looking for experience in handling several parallell releases within different states of development, since there was a lack of this in the project. I helped them set up an infrastructure and a process supporting this, within the frames of their existing development process RUP. However I suggested them to have fewer parallell development tracks but more frequent releases, instead of having many long parallell releases.

Another problem I discovered was the project management were making project plans far beyond the horizon of predictability, and where at the same time very eager to deliver on schedule. This meant that they were having lots of slack in their plans, and thus periodically lots of unutilized resources. Having an agile process and being adaptive to changes would remove the slack and also getting more frequent feedback from the busiess side of the project.

I tried to introduce agile ideas into the project and had the full support from the development team, but unfortunately not enough support from the project management. The developers actually introduced continuous integration and CruiseControl.

Posted by Jens on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 11:33 am.