Agile Development¶

Key Concepts¶

Iterational - develop, release, test, fix/update/change and repeat. Going through release cycles quickly to get real world, real value feedback during the development of the software.
Incrementational - the entire system is not developed all at once, features are added in order of priority and even features can be added incrementally.
Heavy customer time investment - the customer continually needs to invest time into requirements and testing of each release.
Functional software > documentation - every 2-3 weeks the requirements change and thus documentation is not always priority.
Nimble - very responsive to customer changes.
Sprints - 2 or 3 week segments where working, tested, functional (even if partially) features are given to the customer for testing and approval.

Frequent iterative releases align customer expectation early on.
Software bugs/design issues are discovered sooner and can be addressed early on in the project.
Useful methodology when business requirements are difficult to determine.
Since features are released regularly, changes are easier to incorporate.
Easy to measure individual performance and contribution in daily meetings.

Lack of documentation, new users or new developers take a while to get up to speed.
Huge time commitments from users and developers as it is a very communication heavy model.
Can be inefficient in large organisations as communication becomes difficult in large teams where detailed documentation is often required.
Lack of a definite end date can lead to continual demand for more features.
Incredibly dependent on team collaboration.

Scrum
- Daily stand ups.
- Self-organising, self-managing teams.
Extreme Programming
- Values simplicity, communication, consistent feedback, respect.
Feature driven development