What is Agile Development?

Agile development is popular. The large organizations are doing it:  Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.

Agile development isn’t a specific process you follow its more about a philosophy – a way of thinking about software development. From a business point of view the agile manifesto places strong emphasis on ensuring close interaction and collaboration between the development team and the business, and in a technical context it places importance on developers working collaboratively on short iterations of work – continually refining the design, reviewing each others code, and delivering smaller units of work frequently.

The Agile Manefesto

Values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

Principles:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software

• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage

• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project

• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done

• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation

• Working software is the primary measure of progress

• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely

• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility

• Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential

• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams

• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly

Agile development isn’t necessarily a solution to improving productivity. Its benefits come from working differently, not from working faster. Teams learning agile development will go slower while they learn, and emphasizing productivity might encourage a team to take shortcuts and to be less rigorous in their work, which could actually harm productivity.

The aim is to find the right approach for the project – and this will involve a certain amount of trial and error. The important point though is that IT industry is adopting agile frameworks in a big way since its advantages have been proven to be quite real.