Task: Increment Review
Each microcycle ends with an increment review. Informally, this is known as the "Party Phase" and consists of not only a celebration of ongoing success but also of a review of how the project is progressing.
Disciplines: Project Management
Purpose
The purpose of the Increment Review ("Party Phase") is to measure progress against plan and to adjust to optimize progress and minimize the effect of any slippage.
Relationships
Main Description

The Party Phase looks at several aspects of the project to determine what, if any, corrective actions are necessary to optimize a project's performance. This is done at the end of each spiral to improve the project progress on subsequent ones. Normally, the increment review is performed in 1/2 to 1 day of calendar time and includes only project lead personnel (project manager, architect, safety czar, quality assurance, and team leads).

Many projects have a "post mortem". This comes from the medical parlance that means to discover the cause of death. Since the Harmony Process is a "the cup is half full, not half empty" in its perspective, this periodic analysis is viewed as a "celebration of ongoing success" hence "Party" not "post mortem."

The Increment Review occurs at the end of every micro-cycle and may take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days to perform, depending on the scope of the problem and how well the project is progressing.

Steps
Review team issue questionnaire
While optional, it is recommended to solicit feedback from your team members as to what roadblocks they have encountered during their work. This feedback can be more-or-less formal. Less formal is recommend. The issues identified by the team members are reviewed during this step to identify corrective actions or alternative workflows that address the concerns.
Review schedule
The schedule is reviewed to identify any lagging or leading tasks in execution of the planned schedule, develop alternative strategies if required, and to update the planned schedule as necessary. Such activities might include rearranging the worker assignments, moving out or in a scheduled task, adding new staff, adding support tasks (such as training), and so on.
Review architecture
The architecture develops over a number of microcycles. The increment review ensures that the architecture is meeting the current needs and is scaling to meet the anticipated future needs. If a problem is identified, a task to develop a more robust scalable architecture may result.
Review risks
During the Increment Review, the risk reduction activities performed during the previous microcycle are examined and their results evaluated and used for the basis of adapting the development plans and schedules. In addition, future risk reduction activities are examined to ensure they are still applicable. Lastly, newly identified risks are evaluated to see if they should be added to the Risk Management Plan and result in risk reduction activities.
Review process workflows

During initial planning, detailed workflows are often constructed to provide guidance for tasks such as

  • configuration management
  • requirements management
  • requirements traceability
  • system build and compilation
  • unit testing

Due to technical, infrastructure, or personnel reasons, these workflows sometimes prove to be problematic or inefficient. You don't have to live with an inefficient workflow. During this review, you examine problematic workflows to optimize them.

For example, it may happen that you've chosen to centralize your configuration management onto a remote server but the connection to that server is down half of the time. Rather than live with this, you might make a local backup on the server onto a local server and use it instead for the day, reconciling the two servers overnight.

Key Considerations

The Increment Review focuses on the following aspects of the prototype being developed:

  • Schedule - Is the project on schedule? If not, can it be put back on schedule? Possible solutions include feature reductions, outsourcing, project reorganization, resource reallocation, and rescheduling.
  • Architecture - The architecture is normally elaborated in different aspects as the project progresses. It is important that the final architecture is being approached in a converging fashion. Because architectural defects are so expensive, their identification and correction as early as possible is crucial to project success.
  • Process - Is the process working well? Are there process steps that are too expensive, time-consuming, or difficult to perform? This aspect focuses on fixing any defects or problems in the process.
  • Risk - Most projects that fail do so because risks were ignored. In the Harmony process, a Risk Management Plan is an important artifact. In this activity, the risks in the plan are examined to be sure that they are being appropriately handled in a timely way as well as looking for new risks looming on the horizon.