Agile Software Development

Short Description
Ideas about the process of developing software have been around almost as long as software itself. These ideas progressed from ad hoc processes to various forms of the waterfall model. Then in 1999, Kent Beck published a book entitled Extreme Programming Explained. The ideas presented in this book broke away from the waterfall model and presented a new paradigm for developing software - Agile Software Development. This paper focuses on the agile development process developed at Strategic Data Systems and presents the results of using this process on three projects.

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Content
The most basic software development method is the ad hoc method. This method has been around since the earliest days of software development and is the method generally encouraged in undergraduate schools across the country. It has two simple stages: Write some code; Fix the problems in the code. No thought is given to the overall design, testing, or maintenance of the system until after the code has been written.
Management often encourages ad hoc software development in an attempt to get products finished quickly. However, as studies have shown, products developed using this approach are of low quality. A typical programmer will introduce 100 defects per thousand lines of code written using the ad hoc development process.
An undisciplined approach to software development has three primary problems. First, after a number of iterations through the code and fix cycle, the code becomes so poorly structured that changes become increasingly difficult and expensive. Second, the software does not match what the user needs, and finally, code is expensive to fix because of poor preparation for testing and modification. As a matter of practice, no reproducible tests are developed.
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