Agile Application Development

I read an article on Agile development: “Agile Adoption – Crossing the Chasm: Why is it so difficult to switch to agile process from waterfall?” by Udayan Banerjee

The article explains how the old school waterfall process of locking down requirements when developing solutions is flawed. This process does prevent scope creep but at the end of the day the solution does not meet the business needs because business needs are changing and it is impossible to really know the requirements right from the onset. The result is that you end with an application that meets the requirement document and is completed on budget and on time but does not meet the business needs. There is a gap between what the business needs and the requirements at the onset of the project. The only way to close the gap is by using an iterative agile process like scrum. Successful application development teams know this and are actively pursuing this kind of methodology. The challenge of course becomes around budgeting, scheduling and how frequent to release each update to the user team. This article does a good job of walking through this.

Is there a place for a more agile design and deployment process for infrastructure implementation? Not completely however, understanding why agile development is effective and the direction for application development should help when doing infrastructure implementation. Keeping the agile concepts in mind and working toward more integration of the users in envisioning planning and deploying an infrastructure solution will help ensure the business needs are met.

Here is a link to Mr. Banerjee’s article:
http://udayanbanerjee.ulitzer.com/node/1137387