Summary

The chapter can be summarized as follows:

• Estimating costs for an agile project is a team activity and starts with the release planning meeting.

• Inviting volunteers from the team to be a part of the budget task force ensures the team’s ownership of the project as a whole and leads to better estimating and control.

• Educating the team on different costs associated with the project will help mitigate the risk of “unknown unknowns.”

• All projects, including agile projects, carry the difficulties of making tough tradeoffs between cost, schedule, and scope.

• Agile projects are estimated top-down with detail and accuracy appropriate to the time horizon: the farther away the deadline, the grosser the estimate; the closer the deadline, the more detailed the estimate.

• Cost estimates become more refined throughout the project’s lifecycle.

• Cost control occurs at the release level; cost baselines are updated based on the deliverables of each iteration, velocity, and customer changes to scope.

• AgileEVM is a valuable technique when cost performance must be measured.