Monday, April 24, 2017

Agile - Crystal Methodology

Crystal Methodology
In Crystal Methodology, projects are categorized according to the size of the project, the number of people involved, and criticality. Crystal Methodologies, developed by Alistair Cockburn, are designed for projects ranging from small teams developing low critical solutions to large teams developing mission critical solutions.

The different levels of criticality are Comfort, Discretionary Money, Essential Money, and Life.

Crystal Methodology—Key Principles

Depending on the project span, Agile processes must be extended beyond face-to-face communications. Additional verifications, validations, and traceability measures can be introduced as needed, thereby improving project flexibility.

Some of the key principles of Crystal Methodology include:

Frequent delivery
Reflective improvement
Osmotic communication
Personal safety
Focus
Ease of access to experts
Technical environment with automated tests, configuration management, and frequent integration

Crystal Methodology—Key Categories

Crystal methodology can be categorized in different ways. The important categories are Crystal Clear and Crystal Red.

Crystal Clear is for small teams working on projects with low risk to life and using discretionary monies. In the image, the projects that fall on the far left, with team size of one to six, belong to this category. These projects develop less critical solutions, and failure of which would result in low financial loss.

Crystal Red is for a larger project that deals with life and death implications, which would have more governance, documentation, and control gates. In the image, the projects on the far right belong to this category. Failure to achieve the required results would result in significant loss to the organization. Hence as the team size increases, it is important to increase communications within the team using tools to help improve project delivery.

Also, the crystal methodology moves on to Crystal Yellow and Crystal Orange as the size of the team and complexity increases.

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