Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed

Barry Boehm has been trying to balance agility and discipline in software development since 1955. The TRW professor of software engineering and director of the USC Center for Software Engineering, he earlier served as director of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Office and as a chief scientist at TRW. Dr. Boehm's contributions to the field include the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), the Spiral Model of the software process, the Theory W (win-win) approach to software management and requirements determination, and his classic book, Software Engineering Economics (Prentice Hall, 1981). Richard Turner, a research professor in engineering management and systems engineering at the George Washington University, approaches balanced software development and acquisition with broad industry and government experience and a skeptical attitude toward best practices. In support of the U.S. Department of Defense, he is responsible for identifying and transitioning new software technology into the development and acquisition of complex, software-intensive defense systems. Dr. Turner was on the original author team for Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and is coauthor off CMMI Distilled, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2004).