Sunday, December 17, 2006

Agile Development -- competitive advantage

Huge benefits can be gained from Agile Development methodologies in reacting to market demands in a timely manner. I have worked on Agile projects, and worked on "Waterfall" projects (where the large, bureaucratic company feels its important to 'define requirements for 3 months', 'build for 4 months', 'test for 2 months'), and the results are not even comparable. Not only that, but the experiences felt by developers and customers alike are not even comparable. The Agile method fosters a great relationship between IT and customers, whereas Waterfall results in increased feelings of pressure and mistrust. Waterfall development methods are the wrong way to go when developing software.

I'd highly recommend picking up an Agile Development book on Amazon and reading it. Here are a couple I have read and found valuable:

Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide (Paperback)

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback)

OutSystems explains the reason why Agile Software Development projects make economical sense:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting your note, I've followed up the company and they've just launched an edition of their platform named "Outsystems Express Edition" that apparently one can download and play around.

Anonymous said...

Fully agree.
The Waterfall model promotes a Command & Control approach that is being used for the past decades, with very poor results.

Too often you see projects being frozen when they start being implemented, because companies realize that the requirements they gathered during 4 months have changed and the design (that took 2 more months) is no longer valid.

I personally know a lot of projects that never reached an end. For those that did, they are constantly being restarted to try and implement the required changes... they drag for years...

And at the end of the day users don't like them and adoption is lousy. If systems are outdated when they are deployed, then it's impossible to get users to actually use (and like) them.

Agile is definitely the way to go to ensure business alignment and user adoption.

The video you posted says it all.