Software projects very rarely both come in on time and on budget and satisfy their end users. It’s much easier to satisfy one of the above conditions, either working according to your original plan or adapting to the changing needs of your users. Satisfying both requires a certain amount of prescience. Demarco and Lister list Schedule Flaws as one of their 5 Risks of Software Project Management. In this article, we’ll discuss several symptoms and causes of schedule flaws, present metrics and diagrams that can be used to track your team’s progress against its schedule, and describe Agile ways to address this risk.

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Whole-team approach — the agile practice in which the entire team works as a unit of generalizing specialists to share responsibility for producing high-quality software — can yield powerful benefits like lowering risk to delivery, improving velocity/cycle time, producing better ideas and reducing defects and other waste. Like other agile practices, though, whole-team approach requires discipline and diligence. So here are a few “smells” that might indicate that you’re not optimally practicing whole-team approach, along with some possible remedies.

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