An Introduction to Agile Software Development

Short Description
This paper is an introduction to the Agile school of software development, and is primarily targeted at IT managers and CXOs with an interest in improving development productivity. What is Agile? How can Agile help improve my organization? First, I introduce the two broad schools of thought when it comes to software development: traditional sequential, a.k.a. “the waterfall method”, and iterative methods of which Agile is a subset. My objective is to demonstrate the short-comings of the waterfall approach while providing a solution in iterative, and more specifically, Agile methods.

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Content
Part I – Shortcomings of Traditional Waterfall Approach
The essence of waterfall software development is that complex software systems can be built in a sequential, phase-wise manner where all of the requirements are gathered at the beginning, all of the design is completed next, and finally the master design is implemented into production quality software. This approach holds that complex systems can be built in a single pass, without going back and revisiting requirements or design ideas in light of changing business or technology conditions. It was first introduced in an article written by Winston Royce in 1970, primarily intended for use in government projects.
Waterfall equates software development to a production line conveyor belt. “Requirements analysts” compile the system specifications until they pass the finished requirements specification document to “software designers” who plan the software system and create diagrams documenting how the code should be written. The design diagrams are then passed to the “developers” who implement the code from the design (See Figure 1).
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