Agile methodologies are current best practice in software development. They are favored for, among other reasons, preventing premature optimization by taking a somewhat short-term focus, and allowing frequent replans/reprioritizations of upcoming development work based on recent results and current backlog. At the same time, funding agencies prescribe earned value management accounting for large projects which, these days, inevitably include substantial software components. Earned Value approaches emphasize a more comprehensive and typically longer-range plan, and tend to characterize frequent replans and reprioritizations as indicative of problems. Here we describe the planning, execution and reporting framework used by the LSST Data Management team, that navigates these opposite tensions.

Date Published: 19 August 2016
PDF: 18 pages
Proc. SPIE 9911, Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy VII, 99110N (19 August 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2233380

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9911:
Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy VII
George Z. Angeli; Philippe Dierickx, Editor(s)