Overview of Agile Software Development

Abstract

Agile thinking is an attempt to simplify things by reducing complexity of planning, by focusing on customer value, and by shaping a fruitful climate of participation and collaboration. There are a vast number of methods, techniques, best practices, that claim to be “agile.” In this chap. we want to give an overview of the most common ones. The five principles of a fractal team, which we introduced in Chap. 1, apply to most of them: self-similarity, goal orientation, self organization, self improvement, and vitality are cornerstones when implementing an organization capable of executing software projects in an agile way. The desire to establish flexible and efficient development processes which produce high quality results is not new and has not only been applied to software development: More than two decades ago, the manufacturing industry underwent dramatic changes, when the traditional production concepts of Taylor and Ford were challenged by extremely successful Japanese enterprises such as Toyota. The Western hemisphere was puzzled at how the competition from Far East seemed to be able to produce better quality at lower cost and quickly began to outperform the rest of the world. What happened? What was the secret of the amazing efficiency and innovation?