The Agile and Iterative Development Process

The reason I include this seemingly irrelevant chapter in this book is because it is important. What are the factors that make a software project succeed One could say the project has to provide good business values. In addition, the project team has to be technically competent. Although these factors are all necessary for the project to succeed, they are not sufficient. Especially for a software project that has some level of complexity, tight timelines, and resource constraints, a good development process is also critical. Unless your development process is ad hoc, most likely you will use either the waterfall or the iterative development process. Many researchers show that the latter is a much better choice than the former, and many thoughtful leaders advocate its use in most software development projects. 

If you are a software professional, most likely you have run into situations when, after months or even years of development work, you find that your users do not like the product because either the system does not meet requirements (this may be caused by ill-stated and incomplete requirements by the 

Developing Chemical Information Systems An Object-Oriented Approach Using Enterprise Java, by Fan Li Copyright 2007 John Wiley Sons, Inc. 

Feedback from iteration N leads to refinement and adaptation of the requirements and design in iteration N+1 

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. 

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