raganwald
Monday, December 11, 2006
  You call this progress?
One of the things most people want to measure is progress towards project completion. But you can’t measure project completion progress unless you have completed features: developed, integrated, and tested features. A completed feature is done enough for someone to use.
Johanna Rothman, Measuring Project Completion Progress

I can’t emphasize this point strongly enough. In a mini-presentation on connecting outcomes to project success, I suggested that when measuring progress, evidence of achieving the “ends” is more valuable than evidence of achieving the “means.”

In other words, evidence of completed features, things of use and value, is more useful than evidence that we are “on plan” or “in compliance with the methodology.”

Always.

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Comments on “You call this progress?:
I totally agree! The last 90% of any feature always seems to take 50% of the time.
 
Without a doubt. Anyone knows that you never go to market with a 100% requirements completed product. It would never be released. There is no such thing. A whole product is the sum of all features that accomplish the basic tasks and operations the software was initially set out to do. The rest is just "nice to have". Often times folks outside the development lifecycle forget this nugget of understanding during development and testing phases. Ever here "my clients not going to buy this stuff without that specific feature, its got to be in there."
 
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