Agile Class Week 3: Retrospectives

To deliver continuous improvement, agile promotes a different mindset about how to build projects and to improve processes. An initial group of 17 methodologists formed the Agile Software Development Alliance. This group of people defined a manifesto for encouraging better ways of developing software, and then based on that manifesto formulated a collection of principles which defines the criteria for agile software development processes.

This week,  we have discussed each agile principles which helped me to gain a better understanding of what agile software development is all about. What I really like about agile is continuous improvement, that is why it is iterative and incremental. This reminds me of  what Winston Churchill said, "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." Because of this, I got more curious about which methodology is better in software development. After reading blogs and watching videos, I have learned that it depends on the project. Waterfall is suited for projects that are smaller, well-defined, simpler projects with a fixed scope, time and budget. Agile is better for projects that are larger, undefined, complex projects with scope for changing requirements. Both methodolodies have the same goal which is to make sure that the product will be created correctly and will have a high-quality source code.

Source(s):

Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban