This essay has continued to be one of the most popular essays. I feel somewhat bidden to keep it up to. In its original form the essay. I then understood them. Too much has. happened with agile methods since for me to keep up with the. I do provide some links to continue your. The differences in principles still remain, and. Ive kept. From Nothing, to Monumental, to Agile. Most software development is a chaotic activity, often. The software is written. This actually works. This article got some great commments. Scroll down to read those. Ive worked on big projects, small projects, in huge teams and by myself, in fossilized federal. The New Methodology. In the past few years theres been a blossoming of a new style of software methodology referred to as agile methods. Alternatively. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. These are our values and principles. Agile Day Riga 2017 the conference is to provide a clear explanation why Agile and Lean software development approaches became so important nowadays, show how these. Furthermore. bugs become increasingly prevalent and increasingly difficult to fix. A typical sign of such a system is a long test phase after the system. Such a long test phase plays havoc with. The original movement to try to change this introduced the. These methodologies impose a disciplined. They do this by. developing a detailed process with a strong emphasis on planning. I like to. refer to them as engineering methodologies another widely used. Engineering methodologies have been around for a long time. Theyve. not been noticeable for being terribly successful. They are even less. The most frequent criticism of these. Theres so much stuff to. Agile methodologies developed as a reaction to these. For many people the appeal of these agile. These new methods attempt a useful compromise between. The result of all of this is that agile methods have some. The most. immediate difference is that they are less document oriented, usually. In. many ways they are rather code oriented following a route that says. However I dont think this is the key point about agile. Lack of documentation is a symptom of two much deeper. Agile methods are adaptive rather than predictive. Engineering methods tend to try to plan out a large part of the software. So their nature is to resist change. The agile methods. They try to be processes that adapt and. Agile methods are people oriented rather than. The goal of engineering methods is to define a. Agile. methods assert that no process will ever make up the skill of the. In the following sections Ill explore these differences in. Predictive versus Adaptive. Separation of Design and Construction. The usual inspiration for methodologies is engineering. Such disciplines. Such engineers. will work on a series of drawings that precisely indicate what needs. Many design. decisions, such as how to deal with the load on a bridge, are made as. The drawings are then handed over to a. Its assumed. that the construction process will follow the drawings. In practice. the constructors will run into some problems, but these are usually. Since the drawings specify the pieces and how they need to be. Such a plan can figure out the tasks that need to be done and. This allows for a. It also. says in detail how the people doing the construction work should do. This allows the construction to be less skilled. So what we see here are two fundamentally different. Design which is difficult to predict and requires. Once we have the design, we can plan the construction. Once we have the plan for the construction, we can then deal with. In civil engineering. So the approach for software engineering methodologies looks. To do this we must separate design from construction. Therefore we need to figure out how to do the design for software so. So what form does this plan take For many, this is the role. UML. If. we can make all the significant decisions using the UML, we can build. But here lies the crucial question. Can you get a design that is. And if so, is cost of doing this sufficiently small to make. All of this brings a few questions to mind. The first is the. UML like design into a state. The problem with a UML like. The models that civil. Furthermore the key issues, such as the way. The. only checking we can do of UML like diagrams is peer review. While. this is helpful it leads to errors in the design that are often only. Even skilled designers, such as I. Another issue is that of comparative cost. When you build a. In software the amount of time spent in. Mc. Connell suggests that for a large. Even if you lump in. This raises an important question about the nature of design in. These kinds of questions led Jack Reeves to suggest that in fact the source code is a. Indeed anything that you can treat as. This thinking leads to some important conclusions In software construction is so cheap as to be free. In software all the effort is design, and thus requires. Creative processes are not easily planned, and so. We should be very wary of the traditional engineering. Its a different kind of activity and. The Unpredictability of Requirements. Theres a refrain Ive heard on every problem project Ive. The developers come to me and say the problem with this. The thing I. find surprising about this situation is that anyone is surprised by. In building business software requirements changes are the norm. One route is to treat changing requirements as the result of. The idea behind requirements. One problem with this is that just trying to understand the. Its even tougher because the. You end up being in the situation where you may have. Without much. idea of the cost, how can you figure out whether you want to pay for. Estimation is hard for many reasons. Part of it is that. Part of it is that the basic materials keep changing rapidly. Part of it is that so much depends on which individual people are. Softwares intangible nature also cuts in. Its very. difficult to see what value a software feature has until you use it. Only when you use an early version of some software do you. This leads to the ironic point that people expect that. After all software is supposed to. So not just are requirements changeable, they ought to. It takes a lot of energy to get customers of software. Its even worse if theyve ever dabbled in. But even if you could settle all that and really could get an. In todays economy the fundamental business forces are changing the. What might be a good set of. Even if the. customers can fix their requirements, the business world isnt going. And many changes in the business world are. Everything else in software development depends on the. If you cannot get stable requirements you cannot get a. Is Predictability Impossible In general, no. There are some software developments where. Organizations such as NASAs space shuttle. Tile Shower Corner Shelf Installations on this page. It requires a lot of ceremony, plenty of time, a large. There are projects out there that are. However I dont think much business software fits into. For this you need a different kind of process. One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a. People who work on methodology are. Most. methodologists want their methodologies to be usable by everyone, so. This. leads to people using a methodology in the wrong circumstances, such. Theres a strong temptation to do that. Predictability is a.