This is the eight of 12 posts about the principles of agile software development. Purpose is to go back to the start of the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html) and discuss the implementation of the 12 principles in real life software engineering. Goals of agility are to go deliver software of higher quality, faster, with a higher acceptance to end-users and able to follow the changing business requirements to strive for competitive advantage.

The question is: is this going to work in practice or is this only based on a nice marketing and sales story.

Principle 8 : Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely

Sustainable development means constant production of softwarefeatures during a long lasting period. This is done without loss of concentration within the team or a rising amount of errors as a result of fatigue or frustration. Software development is like running a marathon and not 100 meters sprint. You have to keep up to speed but not run so fast that you exhaust yourself or your team members.

I (and many of my colleagues) recall working on More >