Agilier was very pleased to attend the Agile Business Conference 2006. Some of the highlights were:
- A workshop on an agile version of Earned Value Analysis (EVA). EVA is the industry-standard technique for measuring project budget and schedule variance. One of the criticisms of the technique is that is heavyweight to use, with thirty-three indicators. The agile version of EVA that was demonstrated used just a handful of key indicators. Although in the research stage, it looked very promising - one of the criticisms of agile technologies is that they lack heavyweight credibility with senior executives. This approach may go a long way to ameliorate this.
- An open-source version of one of the most popular software development processes - the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The new version is called the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), from IBM. This is a free version of RUP; much simpler and with fewer documents – all positive things in my opinion. They are various plug-ins planned for different agile methodologies. More details here...
