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I'm considering re-reading Steve McConnell's excellent "Software Project Survival Guide" and perhaps applying it verbatim to my next project. However, one thought struck me: the book was written in 1998, before Scrum and other agile methodologies became popular.
Are the teachings of this book still relevant in light of the newer methodologies? Or are they compatible? If the latter, do you have any experience of agile projects run according to McConnell's book(s)?
In general, yes, the tips in the book are applicable to any software project. In the "Preliminary Survival Briefing" section of the book, Steve McConnell writes:
The plan described in the following chapters has been crafted to address the most common weaknesses that software projects face. It is loosely based on the "key process areas" identified by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Level 2 of the SEI Capability Maturity Model. The SEI has identified these key processes as the critical factors that enable organizations to meet their schedule, budget, quality, and other targets. About 85 percent of all organizations before below Level 2, and this plan will support dramatic improvements in those organizations. The SEI has defined the key process areas of Level 2 as follows:
- Project planning
- Requirements management
- Project tracking and oversight
- Configuration management
- Quality assurance
- Subcontract management
This book addresses all of these areas except subcontract management.
The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) has superseded the Capability Maturity Model, and with CMMI comes process areas for integrated product development teams, additional requirements engineering and risk management activities, which further enable achieving agile development within the CMMI framework. However, that doesn't mean that adhering to the CMM prevents agile methods.
You specifically mention staged software delivery and that it appears to be counter to the methods used in Extreme Programming and Scrum. In an iteration or sprint, you actually do go through each stage - requirements gathering and prioritization, estimation, work breakdown, design, implementation, testing, and release. In more traditional agile methodologies, those are extremely short iterations of 2 weeks, while in the spiral model, they could be 6 months or longer. The differences are how much you can do in a particular iteration and how you plan and budget that work.
