Agile View Of Process

An agile philosophy for software engineering stresses four key issues : the importance of self-organizing teams that have control over the work they perform : communication and collaboration between team members and between practitioners and their customers, a recognition that change represents an opportunity; and an emphasis on rapid delivery of software that satisfies the customer. Agile process models have been designed to address each of these issues.
Extreme programming (XP) is the most widely used agile process. Organized as four framework activities – planning, design, coding, and testing – XP suggests a number of innovative and powerful techniques that allow an agile team to create frequent software releases delivering features and functionality that have been described and then prioritized by the customer.
Adaptive Software Development (ASD) stresses human collaboration and team self-organization. Organized as three framework activities – speculation, collaboration, and learning. ASD uses an iterative process that incorporates adaptive cycle planning., relatively rigorous requirements gathering methods, and an iterative development cycle that incorporates customer focus groups and formal technical reviews as real-time feedback mechanisms.
The Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) defines three different iterative cycles – functional model iteration, design and build iteration, and implementation preceded by two additional life cycle activities – feasibility study and business study. DSDM advocates the use of time box scheduling and suggests that only enough work is required for each software increment to facilitate movement to the next increment.
Scrum emphasizes the use of a set of software process patterns that have proven effective for projects with tight timeliness, changing requirements, and business criticality. Each process pattern defines a set of development tasks and allows the Scrum team to construct a process that is adapted to the needs of the project.
Crystal is a family of agile process models that can be adopted to the specific characteristics of a project. Like other agile approaches, Crystal adopts an iterative strategy but adjusts the rigor of the process to accommodate projects of different sizes and complexities.
Feature Driven Development (FDD) is somewhat more “formal” than other agile methods, but still maintains agility by focusing the project team on the development of features – client-valued functions that can be implemented in two weeks or less, FDD provides greater emphasis on project and quality management than other agile approaches.
Agile Modeling (AM) suggests that modeling is essential for all systems, but that the complexity, type, and size of the model must be turned to the software to be built. By proposing a set of core and supplementary modeling principles, AM provides useful guidance for the practitioner during analysis and design tasks.