This is the fourth 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 4: Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Strange, shouldn’t this be common practice? In my daily work I meet lots of developers that have never had any contact with business people. The only notice of the business they get is the constant feed of PowerPoint presentations. When they are lucky the presentations contain hard to understand schemas, “roadmaps” and high level (or extremely detailed) business requirements.

This 4th principle tries to overcome the communication and cultural differences between ICT and business. It recognizes that there More >