This is the seventh of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.

The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.

Principle 7: Working software is the primary measure of progress. How do you measure progress in agile projects? The required functionality is not fixed and the planning of construction and delivery of these requirements is done by the team, in a very late stage. This is something traditional project managers have a hard time to cope with. They think it is impossible to control a project, with an unclear outcome and a planning, that is based upon a work backlog and the duration of a sprint (iteration).

The fundamental measure of progress is measuring things that are finished. Software (in our More >