An Introduction to Agile Software Development

Short Description
Agile software development (also called “agile”) isn’t a set of tools or a single methodology, but a philosophy put to paper in 2001 with an initial 17 signatories. Agile was a significant departure from the heavyweight document-driven software development methodologies—such as waterfall—in general use at the time. While the publication of the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” didn’t start the move to agile methods, which had been going on for some time, it did signal industry acceptance of agile philosophy. A recent survey conducted by Dr. Dobb’s Journal shows 41 percent of development projects have now adopted agile methodology, and agile techniques are being used on 65 percent of such projects.

Website: www.serena.com | Filesize: 555kb
No of Page(s): 11

Content
…
Agile vs. waterfall: practical differences in methodology
The first software development methodologies were hardly methodologies at all, but a free-for-all as organizations struggled to profit from new computer-related technologies. As the industry learned more about developing software, certain techniques for managing and predicting the cost of software development projects came into use. The methodology that has dominated software development projects for decades is called “waterfall.” Winston Royce coined the term in 1970 to describe a serial method for managing software projects through the five stages shown in Figure 2.
Adoption of waterfall has helped drive down the failure rate of software development projects, but even with rigorous project management and processes, a full 70 percent of software projects using this methodology fail to meet their objectives. To put this in perspective, waterfall software projects have less than half the success rate (66 percent) of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
…

Get the file Download here