This is the second 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 2: Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

This is one of the marketing / sales pitfalls of agile software development. What sales executive like to tell the customer is “Our agile process is designed in such a manner that we can incorporate changes during the whole development phase, even in the end”. This is nice customer expectation management (understatement). What the customer understands form this promise is that this project is able to incorporate all changes in requirements even up to a few More >