Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules

Development-Speed Trade-Offs

One of the philosophies undergirding this book is that it is better to make trade-off decisions with your eyes open than closed. If development speed is truly your top priority, then go ahead and increase the cost of the project and compromise the product's feature set in order to deliver it on time. But understand the implications of the decisions you make. Don't close your eyes and hope that somehow you'll be able to optimize your project for schedule, cost, and features all at the same time. You won't. Instead, you'll end up optimizing it for none of them; you'll waste time and money and deliver a product with less functionality than you otherwise could have.

With rare exceptions, initial resource estimates and ...