TABLE OF CONTENTS Planning, managing and monitoring projects that are agile, adaptive and incremental can be very difficult. As was illustrated in the last chapter, although many of the ideas behind methods such as XP can, and indeed have been very successfully applied, it does not mean that it is easy or that they are particularly scalable (particularly for those new to XP).
So, what do you do if you want to acknowledge that the real world is an uncertain and changing place. If you want to adopt an agile and adaptive method, but you don't want to lose control of the project. That is, you don't want to sacrifice the project on the altar of agility!
This is no trivial matter. Adaptive, iterative projects are more complex to control, and to plan, than more traditional, linear, waterfall models (partly because they reflect reality but more on this later). In the linear model, life is simpler, node-sign starts until all analysis has been completed, in turn no implementation starts until all the design is finished. Thus, at any one time, it should be very clear what is being done, by whom and why. In addition, the requirements are fixed back at the start of the whole project, making things a lot simpler for the poor developer. Of course, the reality is, that not only may the requirements have been wrong in the first place or they may have missed some important behaviour, but the world may change over the 2 years...
