Agile Development

From IRF Wiki

The fundamental principle of Agile development practices is that there is a huge reward for being suspicious of the quality of your initial requirements for a system. Agile development methods attempt to reduce the requirements for any system to the smallest size that can then be implemented and put into the hands of users. The experience of deploying and using a system, even one that is small compared to the size of the eventual system, provides the evidence and experience that clear up the true requirements needed to produce the maximum value. The development then proceeds in increments in which a little more of the system is built and deployed to further clarify requirements. As more of the system is built, the increments can contain more functionality and the development can proceed faster.

Agile development techniques are a large umbrella including such methods as eXtreme Programming, Scrum, the Rational Unified Process, and many others, each of which is aimed at a different problem.

At some point in this section we can summarize the differences between these methods and their applicability to the problems in the book. The discussion at the forum revealed the use and applicability of Agile development principles in several areas.

• Web 2.0: The Perpetual Beta

Launching things early has become a standard practice in Web 2.0 leader. Remember that Gmail is still a beta product. So is Google News. So is... The perpetual beta is just another name for Agile development as applied to an on-line service. While this is attractive for new services, the approach does have limits. Who would want their bank account to be in perpetual beta? or the software for Air Traffic Control?

• Web 2.0: Emergent Mashups

The API platforms built by Web 2.0 leaders have become a catalyst for innovation. Mashups cannot exist without raw materials to combine and recombine. The APIs are the platforms that enable this innovation. The nature of most mashups is that they are an edge phenomenon all allow experimentation and collaboration.