Agile meets DCMA

An interesting debate at a program meeting last week - the DCMA 14 point analysis was being summarised for a group using Agile methodology. The sponsor for the program is a government agency and software development is being done by one of the well known large contracting companies. Major features of the required system are well described but not so for many of the details. For one of the phases, the contractor proposed using an Agile approach with month long sprint cycles. The government still has to use earned value methods for reporting project progress and demonstrating sound management to the Government Accountability Office.

So we have the Agile project plan which includes time-bound sprint cycles with a backlog list approach to scope of deliverables in each cycle. And on the other side is scoring the project for compliance with the 14 points.

For those who haven't come across them, the DCMA 14 points are a way of assessing the structure of a project, typically adversely scoring items like 'tasks without predecessors or successors' or 'delays between linked tasks'. The first attempt at putting together a project plan to represent sprint cycles strained the DCMA scores on leads and lags and date constraints. It will be interesting to see how the second attempt comes out.