Scope Soft or Dates Soft
Myth: agile software development skips planning. Wrong!
Customers have the right to a plan - what can be done, when, and at what cost. The business needs this to function.
But! being both accurate and precise requires actually building the project. Anything less is guesswork. So builders must describe uncertainty honestly using probability curves.
We can’t promise fixed scope on hard dates, either scope or dates must flex. So instead we provide some kind of probability predicting estimations: “95% confidence we finish the first ten stories by the date, 50% for the next five, 5% for the five after that.” And these numbers change continually shift as each days go by. Sometimes the the schedule is very precise and at other times it’s somewhat soft.
The customers need probability-based plans to manage their business. And when we give honest soft ranges instead of false hard precision, customers can make real decisions: adjusting scope, shifting dates, and changing priorities.
Transparency builds trust; fake certainty destroys it.
Discussions for the team
- Do we give customers probability-based plans or false precision?
- Does the team understand which scope and dates on the schedule are soft?
- Do we update probabilities as we learn?
- Does the customer feel informed or misled by our plans?