Agile iterative development process

However, there are some lessons learned. It is very important to communicate the ideas and benefits of the agile iterative development process to the entire project team and have buy-ins not only from the developers, but also from business analysts, the QA team, and end users. We only have a small QA team that supports many projects and end users are busy with their priorities. It is important to have some rough iteration planning upfront and have some idea about when QA and end users need to be involved in testing. If the plan has to change, inform QA and end users as early as possible. 

There are several flavors of the agile iterative process. The most popular ones are the Rational Unified Process (RUP) (Kruchten, 2003) and Extreme Programming (XP) (Beck, 2004). Other flavors include Scrum (Schwaber and Beedle, 2001), Evo, and Feature-Driven Development (Palmer and Felsing, 2002). The following list of key practices is found in all agile iterative development processes that in my view are the most important. For details, please refer to Larman (2004) and Beck (2004). 

In an agile iterative process, not all use case specifications need to be fully developed before the design and implementation starts. Usually, a scope and a vision document are developed with a fist of features that should be included in the system, including a brief description of each feature as in the Brief Description section of the above use case specification. These features are prioritized and planned according to their business values, complexity, and architectural significance (please see Chapter 5). At the beginning of an... 

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