A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

Chapter 7. Taming the Planning Beast

In Chapter 1, one of the six key principles we introduced as fundamental to our success was “don’t overfill your plate.” The single most important thing we’ve done to keep this from happening is to completely overhaul the way we do planning and scheduling. We like to think of planning/scheduling/estimating as a “necessary evil.” As you already know based on your reading so far, we focus all our energy and efforts on increasing feature throughput (with high quality, of course). Well, planning/estimating by its nature doesn’t increase feature throughput, it reduces it. It happens because the organization wants predictability. A productive part of planning is making sure we have a clear architecture and feature ...