This is the third 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 3: Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Old school linear development methods rely upon the assumption that an extensive specifications and design phase upfront will resolve all uncertainties and specify of all possible functionality in depth. After the design phase the development team retreat to their software factory to deliver the desired software in one big bang (in many cases many months or even more than a year later).

The result of this linear approach is a system; of witch the customer thought More >