Alston Grove

I was searching on images.google.com for diagrams about iterative software development, and I found this image. It’s a triangle with the vertices labeled as “schedule,” “functionality,” and “budget.” On each edge, a project meets its goals for two components, but lacks in the third one. It’s kind of like the Bermuda triangle of software development.

I think an agile development process would try to avoid this triangle, but would prefer to land on the edge of “on schedule and on budget, but reduced functionality.” The triangle misses another factor of software, which is quality. A project could deliver a full system on time at the right price, but be pretty buggy in production. I think quality is the worst sacrifice to make because it’s very frustrating to people when they aren’t given a chance to perform at levels that satisfy them. And it leaves developers with a code base that is expensive and painful to maintain. In other words, it reduces developers’ morale and costs more money in the long run when quality is sacrificed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 18th, 2004 at 11:02 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.