What Projects are Suitable for Agile?
Many Agile practitioners and advocates claim that Agile methodologies and tools improve the outcome of every project. Is this true? To address this matter scientifically, Dr. Kevin Thompson, Agile Project Lead at cPrime, ran an in-depth statistical study. He definitively compared a range of projects with identical requirements and recorded how they progressed using Agile methodology and tools, as well as classic plan-driven methodologies. The results are interesting and eye-opening.The Agile study methodology and result parameters
Dr. Thompson’s study, How Agile Should Your Project Be?, initially discusses the effectiveness of traditional project management methods (like waterfall) that attempt to fully plan out a project before beginning it. Historically, this method worked well in many industries, but showed less than optimal results in the software development industry. When the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, it introduced a viable alternative to the plan driven process that proved to be effective for software development (and other industries as well.)Comparing Waterfall and Agile project management
As noted in the table below, the two methodologies are quite different when applied to software development and project management: