Agile Methodology of Software Development

chillibreeze writer — Nandini Beri

The traditional methods of software development work by eliciting and documenting a 'complete' set of requirements, followed by architectural and high-level design, development, and inspection. Frustrating as it is, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between cross-functional teams, customers are unable to freeze them even as they expect more from their software.

Agile is an effective alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes. The strength and usefulness of Agile are both exhibited in projects with frequent changes, as being of adaptive nature rather than predictive, and people-oriented rather than process-oriented.

Agile offers the following advantages over the Waterfall:

Addresses unpredictability: Agile helps teams respond to the unpredictability of developing software through incremental, iterative work cadences called sprints. The development cycles often last four weeks, where each cycle has multiple iterations. The length of iterations is fixed throughout the release. However, the iterative method of development is short on functionality, but otherwise faithful to the demands of the final system; and hence these features can be fully integrated and carefully tested as the final delivery for best results.

Adaptive: The adaptive nature of Agile often requires adaptive customers; not only do they get to check the progress made in every iteration, they can also alter the direction of software development. This results in a much closer relationship with the software developers - a true business partnership. The customer can change system capabilities according to the changing business requirements, and is also able to learn how the system is used in reality allowing for risk control, which is indeed a key advantage of iterative development. Agile emphasizes working software as the primary measure of progress resulting in a more responsive end-product.

The Agile methodology comprises the following elements: Iterations, User stories, Scrum meetings, and XPlanner.

Iteration:

• Development cycle lasts 2-16 weeks
• Should have some set of demo-able functionality at the end of each iteration
• Writing code, testing, and documentation take place in each iteration
• Updates at every iteration
• Participation in the iteration planning meetings
• Accounting for hours spent on work not related to the iteration, thereby, giving an explanation for work spilling over to the next iteration

User stories:

• High-level requirements and features that can be completed within an iteration
• Agile trades precise requirements for user stories
• Creating User Stories for every practice in the Agile system such as XPlanner
• Breaking up of user stories into tasks that do not exceed the time allocated for every iteration

Scrum:

• A fifteen-minute meeting on a daily basis involving team members used to apply closer monitoring and control
• Active participation by each member in terms of answers to questions on current tasks, a road map for the tasks inline, and blockers, if any

XPlanner:

• Track the progress and accuracy of tasks and estimates for future planning with the help of User Stories
• Prioritize and order the User Stories in a given iteration

Now, the question is, should you go Agile? Many believe that Agile is low on scalability, and large software projects are still being conducted in Waterfall. It does not offer any advantage over Waterfall when it comes to classical projects where requirements are nearly always constant and unknowns are rare. Since 'Agile' methods are so fundamentally people-oriented, it is important to first start with a team receptive to being 'Agile'!

Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in February, 2010. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer: Nandini, an information developer, has been a documentation professional for about seven years. She has experience in product writing as well as developing training-ware/course-ware. She has also developed content for web pages and other web applications. She has proposed quality improvement plans for information development for raising documentation standards, and has contributed effectively to documentation reviews, including reviews for functional specification documents. Her career focus is to hold a core writer position that effectively utilizes her writing, communication, and organizational skills. She has the ability to work through aggressive schedules and deadlines with quick turnaround time and has demonstrated skills to work simultaneously on multiple requirements and adapt to changing priorities to re-align deadlines. She has contributed to documentation products in the life sciences, systems management, aviation, and the finance domains.

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