I was at the Agile Business Conference a couple of weeks ago and amoungst lots of very interesting presentations was a comment by Scott Ambler about research into the costs of Big Requirements Up Front (BRUF). By BRUF he means trying to pin down exactly what an IT system (and I would extend this to any system e.g. business, government dept. etc) will do before developing it.

Click here for Scott’s article on the study. In summary BRUF typically leads to significant wastage of resource.

While we didn’t have access to this sort of detailed research at the time, Solution 7 and I knew that to deliver the National Packaging Waste Database in the very tight timescales required, an aglie approach had to be taken. We have met the deadlines and are on course to meet the final go-live date of 1st February 2007, so the approach has been effective. It is nice to know that it was the most efficient approach as well!