Introducing XP—The Agile Methodologies

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

The Agile Methodologies

Agile methods were born out of the frustration software development teams were having with the waterfall approach. These software developers were not seeing the results they felt were necessary to deliver successful projects on a regular basis. They saw several shortcomings with this heavy emphasis on process and documentation.

Several developers who shared the same frustrations with waterfall approaches got together and formed the Agile Alliance. The alliance members agreed on four key values that they felt all agile projects should have in common. They called the compilation of these values the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org). The values of the Agile Manifesto are as follows:

The idea is that by focusing on the values on the left, you shift your approach to software development. It’s not that the items on the right are wrong or bad, but that the items on the left should be more important.

With the increasing popularity of the Internet and e-commerce, businesses are migrating to the Web in alarming rates. With this migration comes the need for rapid deployment of software. In addition, changes in the economy have required development teams to do more with less. Handling these changes gracefully is the focus of the Agile methods.

We’ll return to Agile methods as a group at the end of the chapter and see when it’s best to use XP over the various other Agile methods.