Comments on: Earning up: Agile ‘burn ups’ in an economic turndown http://alterlabs.com/general/articles/earning-up-agile-burn-ups-in-an-economic-turndown/ Results through imagination Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:56:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Alistair Cockburn http://alterlabs.com/general/articles/earning-up-agile-burn-ups-in-an-economic-turndown/comment-page-1/#comment-28117 Alistair Cockburn Sat, 16 May 2009 15:42:29 +0000 http://alterlabs.com/uncategorized/earning-up-agile-burn-ups-in-an-economic-turndown/#comment-28117 Nice article. The hard question is, "how do we find that business value?" Usual agile features and stories are too fine-grained for most people to attach $ value to. In "Software by Numbers", Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang introduce the term "minimum marketable feature" as something coarse-grained enough to do that with. I still haven't seen someone pull this off in real life. Little historical note... It's quite possible that burn charts did indeed arise from "the peyote induced hallucinations of a band of innovative Project Management and Architecture shamans" (lovely image :)... I, for example, never heard of EVM until I'd been using burn charts for 5 years. Then, when I finally arose from my peyote-induced stupor and was shown one of these things, recognized it was the same thing. I have no idea whether or when the Scrum inventors first saw EVM. However, I'm always looking for bridges to make it easier for people who already know something to apply that in the peyote universe (as opposed to people who try to maximize the difference), so I try to maximize the overlap between them in descriptions. Again, nice job - please post or email me if/when you can show an anonymized but real-project version. Alistair Nice article. The hard question is, “how do we find that business value?” Usual agile features and stories are too fine-grained for most people to attach $ value to. In “Software by Numbers”, Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang introduce the term “minimum marketable feature” as something coarse-grained enough to do that with. I still haven’t seen someone pull this off in real life.

Little historical note… It’s quite possible that burn charts did indeed arise from “the peyote induced hallucinations of a band of innovative Project Management and Architecture shamans” (lovely image :)… I, for example, never heard of EVM until I’d been using burn charts for 5 years. Then, when I finally arose from my peyote-induced stupor and was shown one of these things, recognized it was the same thing. I have no idea whether or when the Scrum inventors first saw EVM. However, I’m always looking for bridges to make it easier for people who already know something to apply that in the peyote universe (as opposed to people who try to maximize the difference), so I try to maximize the overlap between them in descriptions.

Again, nice job – please post or email me if/when you can show an anonymized but real-project version.

Alistair

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