Earned Value Management (EVM) in Agile Development

Software development best practice is “agile”, which employs iterations of short, intensive “sprints” to develop the software incrementally, and to address emerging requirements and iterative design. EVM requires significant up-front planning of the entire effort, to create a resource-loaded baseline plan, against which progress is tracked and analyzed in terms of cost and schedule. The agile process does not encourage long-term up-front planning, rather it focuses on the near-term, with the longer-term aspects left “fuzzy”. This presentation demonstrates how to marry these two practices in such a way as to get the benefit of both.