Agile Surveillance Points: An Alternative to Milestone Reviews.

Since the advent of applying Agile [1] practices on DoD projects, specifically Scrum [2] practices, the burning question asked by many has been, "How does Agile integrate with Waterfall [3] milestones?" Agile development is by definition incremental, meaning major functionality is completed and demonstrated to the customer, users, and other stakeholders at specified releases and through a series of short, scheduled iterations (or sprints). Waterfall projects rely on completing all requirements by the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) milestone, completing all design by the Critical Design Review (CDR) milestone, and completing product development by the Test Readiness Review (TRR) milestone. Some success has been made to abate this issue by breaking the typical waterfall-based milestone reviews into multiple interim reviews enabled by the flexibility in the DoD 5000 acquisition regulation requirements. Interim reviews reflect the iterative nature of Agile as they can be held more frequently and with tighter focus than the traditional days-long milestone reviews. This article presents an approach that uses surveillance points throughout the project lifecycle as the basis for technical interchange meetings (TIMS) each of which includes a demonstration and review of completed functionality that can be deployed as an operational component of the final product. When deployed into the targeted domain, users are encouraged to provide reflections of product usage in the form of feedback to the project team in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]