Agile Project Management: Principles and Tools

by Jim Highsmith

Over the last year I've been working with a software product company in Canada that has a mixed product portfolio of large legacy products and exciting new ones. With some of its new products, the company literally doesn't know past the next two- to three-week development iteration which features will be included in the subsequent development iteration. It does have a clear product vision. It does have a product business feasibility plan. It does have a general idea about what features are needed in the product. It does have active involvement from product marketing. It does have a general release time frame and resource expenditure plan. It does have an overall product platform architecture. Within this vision, business and technical framework, and overall product release plan, the company delivers tested features every two to three weeks and then adapts its plans to the reality of the situation as it is today, not how it was months ago when the project first began.