Nov 29, 2010
2 comments
And Because A Developer is Not a Doctor…
Rolling wave planning works well for software development projects.
There is a high degree of uncertainty when gathering requirements or putting together a specification. The challenge in finding the right terms alone, leads to many potential misunderstandings between project sponsors, managers and team members. It can be hard to find the boundary terms that mean the same thing to everyone.
Because of this, when its doable, prototyping is worth more than spec’ing. This can be a UI prototype or a functional prototype or even a screen by screen step-through. But a prototype helps accelerate the conversation between sponsors and team members, and reduces the level of uncertainty (and therefore reduces opportunities for wasted effort).
As an aside, this is often what people are looking for when they turn to Agile project management: repeated prototyping. What draws many people to Agile is the idea of delivering a meaningful and scope controlled prototype, as fast as possible, and iterating from there. That is a central concept behind rolling wave planning.
For many of these circumstances, rolling wave planning with prototyping is a better fit.
One difference between Agile and rolling wave planning is that rolling wave planning doesn’t tightly define the turnaround times for delivering features or a prototype. The project manager is not tied to a pre-defined period for delivering the prototype. Project managers can select the appropriate time period for each iteration.
