Avoiding The Iron Triangle

By John Lewis
September 22, 2010

Many software development projects run afoul of the "Iron Triangle" of project management: the interrelated constraints of Scope, Schedule, and Resources. Simplistically, a change in any one of these constraints has a necessary effect on either one or both of the other two. If the three constraints are out of balance with each other at the beginning of the project, then one or more of them must change/break or the resulting quality of the project is destroyed by artificially meeting the constraints by cutting corners.

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John Lewis

John A. Lewis is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon Inc, the leading independent provider of open source training, consulting, and support in higher education. John is an 18 year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions are large-scale enterprise architecture, open-source technologies, and agile software development methods. John has been working heavily in Java-based enterprise information portals since 2001 and is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, which provides Java Portlet support in the Spring Framework. He is active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai. He also serves on the Jasig Board of Directors and the Sakai Product Council.

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