Change Control and Project Planning

Great post about iterative development and embracing change in large projects.

I recently worked at a client that had a large project and their iterations were 24-36 months! Luckily I was working on a sub-project that had four iterations in one year. Our project was considered successful but the larger one I learned yesterday has been abandoned after four or five years of development.

Agility is the best thing about short iterations - even though both the big project and ours required VB6 (by the client) we were able to select a better grid control for our UI. And if we had continued, it would have been fairly trivial to move our code into the .NET world (though that was probably more because of our architecture than our short cycles).

If you were a team member of the bigger project, “new grid” was a banned phrase, and you could only refer to .NET as .NOT.

Mike