Agile Development

Agile development is a term which describes a software development process which concentrates focus within a project on what is core to software development: the writing of working, maintainable, tested code. Agile development is particularly well suited to projects with rapidly evolving requirements.

Some of the features of agile development:

• it avoids the use of very long, upfront design phases
• it avoids the use of detailed design documentation, preferring the use of more lightweight techniques
• it avoids documentation for its own sake. Well-designed code is often self-documenting, especially when covered by extensive automated testing
• it prefers short release cycles, with regular customer feedback
• it encourages development of a restricted set of features with each iteration, rather than trying to deliver all features in the first iteration
• it encourages prioritisation of required features. If progress slips, less critical features can be omitted, rather than relaxing timescales or allowing quality to be compromised
• it encourages simplicity of design, with refactoring to introduce complexity as this becomes necessary
• it aims to minimise the time to delivery of an initial piece of working software, even if this only covers a subset of initial requirements

We think an agile development works best for enterprise software because it allows high developer productivity, is responsive to change, and lowers project risk.