Software Engineering Institute

Motivated by the agile movement, we developed and applied an experimental incremental design review method about five years ago with an eye toward maturing it for widespread use. The initial trial run included two small projects over a six-month period. This talk describes our experiences as we scaled the method to see how it works in a realistic operational context. In a two-year period, we used the method for over 20 design reviews in the health-care domain with teams using diverse lifecycles, technologies, and experience levels and from several different companies. Attendees will hear firsthand experience applying incremental design reviews on these projects. They will leave the session with artifacts they can use themselves to integrate with agile and SAFe lifecycles (depending on project or enterprise scope). We will also describe how data from this method informed the Enterprise Technical Debt Discovery and Tracking Method (described in our other presentation).