Maximizing value creation in agile sprints

Agile software development principles prioritize the delivery of value through working software. Earlier value creation is preferred to reduce the time to market and get sooner feedback from customers. A challenge in planning agile sprints to achieve value upfront is the tension that exists between the value, resources, size of each feature or story deliverable, and the dependencies among them. While the role of effort and resource constraints in value creation has been studied extensively, the role of dependencies has not been fully addressed in the agile context. In this thesis, we propose a framework to improve value delivery in agile software development by decoupling cyclic dependencies to achieve more robust multi-sprint plans in a scaled agile environment. We analyze this novel approach using an arbitrary test dataset to demonstrate how different decoupling methods yield different value trajectories. We also suggest an optimization method to maximize such value creation through sequencing by simultaneously considering timing, dependencies, and resource allocation. We perform a brute-force optimization approach on the test dataset to demonstrate how more rapid value creation can be achieved over multiple sprints.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Thekkupadam Narayanan, Nithin.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Steven D. Eppinger.

• Engineering and Management Program.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/132895

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/132895