Feature planning in Agile SD... (paper)

Feature planning in distributed Agile software development...
http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-20676-4/#section=891594&page=1&locus=0

A standard problem with Agile software development with multiple parallel teams is the dependency between teams. The teams that develop features/parts of features which are dependent on each other (or one is dependent on the other one) cannot work in parallel. Parallel work is then a recipe for disaster or at least a serious headache...

I've looks for some support in this matter for a while now and this is one of the very good articles that I can recommend. The article shows how distributed teams can plan feature development to avoid parallel development of the same functionality.

In a nutshell: the authors use the concepts of feature architectural similarity analysis and feature chunk contruction to calculate distances between features and use that as an input for feature planning. The idea is pretty simple, although there is some maths in the paper.

Definitely a recommended reading for this weekend... although not for a friday evening.