1) Describe Highsmith's Agile Triangle. How does it differ from the traditional approach to handling project constraints? Do you favor one approach over the other? Explain.
In the Traditional Iron Triangle, the constraints are time, money and scope. Time and cost in a project can be difficult to plan in advance. While in Highsmith’s Agile Triangle we focus on value and quality. The general idea behind the agile triangle is that we need to take the focus off of delivering to a set schedule, a fixed budget, and some predetermined set of deliverables and instead focus more on the value the product is delivering (Leading Agile).
Traditional development teams are supposed to work within the confines of the ‘Iron triangle'. The three sides of the triangle are Scope, Schedule and Cost. Since Agile places a lot of emphasis on quality, it is often considered a dimension which sits at the middle of the triangle.
I would prefer the agile triangle method over the traditional method as Jim Suggested constraints are important project parameters but they are not the goal of the project. Value and Quality are the goals and constraints may need to be adjusted as the project moves forward to increase customer value. According to Jim, Agile teams should focus on the releasable product rather than getting constrained by the iron triangle. The three vertices of the iron triangle collapse into one vertex of the agile triangle called constraints. The other vertices i.e. value and quality define the goals, they are of utmost importance to the stakeholders and need more attention (Infoq).
2) How can the new Agile Triangle work for your projects? Most of the projects I get to deal with are very business oriented and profit generation related, in such scenario value and quality are difficult to measure in the company compared to cost and schedule however in the long run the