The iteration cycle of an agile Smart project

Smart is an easy to implement agile process, that is essentially smart use cases driven. Although Smart mixes very well with other agile processes and techniques, such as Scrum, XP and FDD, the process that takes a project through a little more ceremony than you might expect from a number of other agile processes. For instance, Smart suggests a number of products to add to the backlog, that deal with managing the project environment, such as project plans, estimates, or even setting up the development environment. Moreover, Smart is based on the use of smart use cases, where Scrum and XP on less standardized and less structured (user) stories.

The Smart iteration cycle

Each type of iteration in a Smart project is concerned with delivering a (number of) product(s), not necessarily all code. During early iterations, suggested products could for instance deal with setting up the project, determining the scope, creating a project estimate, or something trivial such as creating a straightforward project plan.

Further down the road, most of the products delivered in iterations will be (designed, built, and tested) accepted use cases. Depending on the type of products to be delivered, the iterations are branded as Propose, Scope, Realize, Finalize, and when the software is put into application maintenance iterations are usually typed as Manage.

There is one thing all these types of iteration have in common. All iterations in a Smart project follow the same procedure. This procedure is called the smart iteration cycle. The smart iteration cycle is split up into three different parts, as depicted in the image below.

The smart iteration cycle contains three major parts. These three parts in an iteration are Plan, Build and Evaluate.

Plan

Planning your iterations is essential. During the iteration kick-off the customer and the project team decide on which products will be delivered during the upcoming iteration. How many products can actually be delivered depend on the team velocity and the estimated effort that is required to realize the individual products.

A small but pragmatic iteration plan is usually set up, which also defines the acceptance criteria for each of the products to deliver – in other word defining done for each of the products.

Smart projects focus on implementing smart use cases ,delivering working software. One of the main reasons for applying these is that the approach to modeling smart use cases is standardized an thus it is easier to define done.  Furthermore, it is also easier to estimate the effort required to realize these (quite often stereotyped) smart use cases.

Build

During the Build part of any iteration, the products will be realized to meet with the done criteria. To be able to monitor a project’s progress we realize products following a simple product life cycle, which is easy to visualize in a project dashboard. Although there are several possible variations of this product life cycle, it is always executed on a daily basis, starting with define what still needs to be done to finalize the product during the daily stand-up meeting.

When it comes to implementing smart use cases, the product life cycle defines brief analysis, design, coding, test and accepting the planned smart use cases. This is in high accordance with YAGNI principles, as elaboration of the individual smart use cases takes as little time as possible before a particular use case is actually built and tested.

Evaluate

Each iteration is rounded up and evaluated. This is quite an important moment in the iteration. Basically we evaluate the speed at which the project is travelling, the products that are delivered and how well the process that is applied suits the project.

Measuring in abstract points, it is quite easy to evaluate the current speed of a project, given the number of iteration spent and the number of points realized. This results in the iteration velocity, the average number of points realized during one iteration. Projecting the iteration velocity on the number of points still left in the project, will present you with an estimated end date. This data is used the steer the project.

Each of the products delivered is briefly considered during evaluation. The project’s progress can often easily be demonstrated with a short demo.

Although Smart projects are highly standardized, we see that it must fit in with the customer organization, or can be optimized to deliver a more precise to what is actually needed, or work even more efficiently. During evaluation adjustment to the process are discussed, and will be implemented during the upcoming iteration.

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