Agile Software Development: It’s about Feedback and Change
Laurie Williams & Alistair Cockburn
Name of Student: Srikanth Nathani
Summary:
The authors described the Agile software development process and the chances of its success. They clearly explained the advantages of this process over the other methods. They successfully convinced that the main aim of the agile software development is to give valuable and reliable software to the users. The main attractive point in this is it always welcomes change. Because of that it requires the continuous involvement of the personnel concentrating on testing it, as it requires never ending feedback. Otherwise it is in no way different from the other methods. They also presented detailed summary of other papers published in this area. This helped a lot in understanding the concept more clearly. This agile software development process is pretty much similar to flexible manufacturing practice. The important deeds of the agile software development process are as follows:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
Strengths:
The main strength of the agile methodologies is its nature of welcoming feedback always. Generally in the large-scale projects one cant avoid changes. If we approach traditional methods we need to struggle hard and we might be in a position of rejecting the good changes. But this agile software development process allows the changes in project plan, personnel etc., as it always welcomes the change. The strength of the concept lies entirely in its attitude of welcoming change always.
Weakness:
The main weakness is the authors failed to discuss about the cost aspects of this process. The cost obviously increases but the thing is will the net profit be more when compared to the profits by the plan driven methodology. The authors failed to convince the readers about the implementation of this process by ignoring the statistics.
This agile computing has one serious setback i.e. it entirely depends on the intelligence of the personnel.
Critical Questions:
What about the extra money investing on the extra personnel? Will that money save the time?
Is it applicable to all kinds of organizations? Or is there any point of threshold for its application?
How far is it feasible to start the project without proper idea of ehat they are going to do?