Bulldozer00's Blog

In Barry Boehm and Richard Turner‘s book, “Balancing Agility And Discipline“,  they present the concept of the “home ground“. Agile and plan-driven (a.k.a. waterfall) software development methodologies each have their own turf where one is superior to the other for getting the job done within time, budget, and quality constraints.

As the figure below shows, the Boehm/Turner definition of “home ground” is based on 5 dimensions: personnel (experience/expertise), criticality, dynamism, size, culture.

At the origin of the 5 dimensional chart, where dynamism is high, culture is liberally open, project size is small, criticality of application is low, and the majority of the project staff is highly competent, agile approaches are more effective and efficient and efficacious. At the extremes of the 5 axes, plan-driven approaches are more effective and efficient and efficacious.

Do you think Boehm and Turner have got it right? Are there any dimensions missing from their model; like level of management humility, quality of management-knowledge worker relationships, quality of tools, quality of physical work environment?