Anchoring the Software Process

The current proliferation of software process models provides flexibility for organizations to deal with the unavoidably wide variety of software project situations, cultures, and environments. But it weakens their defenses against some common sources of project failure, and leaves them with no common anchor points around which to plan and control. This article identifies three milestones -Life Cycle Objectives, Life Cycle Architecture, and Initial Operational Capability -which can serve as these common anchor points. It also discusses why these particular three milestones or their equivalents are success-critical, particularly for large software projects, but for other software projects as well.