Agile Methods in System Development

Study Notes

Agile Methods

Agile methods are incremental development methods that involve customers in the development process to get rapid feedback on changing requirements.
New releases of the system are created and made available to customers every two or three weeks.
Agile methods minimize documentation by using informal communications rather than formal meetings with written documents.

Principles of Agile Methods

Customer involvement: customers should be closely involved throughout the development process to provide and prioritize new system requirements and evaluate the iterations of the system.
Incremental delivery: the software is developed in increments with the customer specifying the requirements to be included in each increment.
People not process: the skills of the development team should be recognized and exploited, and team members should be left to develop their own ways of working without prescriptive processes.
Embrace change: expect the system requirements to change and design the system to accommodate these changes.
Maintain simplicity: focus on simplicity in both the software being developed and in the development process, and actively work to eliminate complexity from the system.

Contracts and Documentation

Writing contracts for agile development may be difficult due to incremental specification.
Agile methods rely on contracts in which the customer pays for the time required for system development rather than the development of a specific set of requirements.
Formal documentation is often not kept up to date and does not accurately reflect the program code.
Agile methods emphasize the importance of writing well-structured code and investing effort in code improvement.

System Maintenance

The lack of documentation should not be a problem in maintaining systems developed using an agile approach.
The system requirements document is the key document for system maintenance, but many agile methods do not create a coherent requirements document.
The use of agile methods is likely to make subsequent system maintenance more difficult and expensive.

Description

This quiz covers the basics of agile methods in system development, including their needs, benefits, and processes. It also touches on customer involvement and minimal documentation in agile development.