Closing agile projects

Dec-17-2007

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

I was giving some thought to how to close out agile projects today and realized that because agile projects are managed in an iterative manner, closing a project should be a simple affair with no surprises. During the lifespan of the project, agile teams should be conducting product review sessions at the end of every two week iteration with their product owners. At the review sessions, the development team should present the functionality they developed in the previous iteration. During the review the product owner and other stakeholders should have the ability to comment on the functionality developed. These reviews allow the product owner to provide iterative acceptance of developed functionality.

Agile teams should also base their work on regularly scheduled releases. These releases should be a culmination of a series of functions and features developed over the course of several iterations. These product releases will be full releases of useable, valuable features to the product owner and their organization. A release review similar to the iteration review described above can be conducted to review release functionality. The product owner will have the ability to accept the functionality within a specified time period after the release date. This provides a second level of acceptance for the product owner.

The final release of the product should follow the same pattern as the release cycle described above. In this way, the final release should really have no other fanfare than any other iteration or release (except for your team’s joy at being done with a product). Because your team has been releasing and gaining client acceptance on a bi-weekly basis, there should be no surprises in this final release. Final client acceptance should just be a formalization of the collective acceptance that has been built up over the life of the project.