Agile-SYS: Technologies and Products

Agile Approach

Our approach to software development is requirement-driven, when customer's requirements are the key. It is an agile software development method with 3 phases: initiation, iterative development and support. This allows us to deliver a high quality product in time and on budget.

At initiation phase, project envisioning, analysis, design and product planning are conducted. Depending on a project size and the initial information provided, this phase takes 2 - 5 days. Each project starts from a mock-up. In most cases to create a mock-up there are neither specifications nor requirements to a new system.

After that, iterative development takes place. The delivery cycle is normally 1-5 days, depending on a feature set. At this stage requirement changes are welcomed. The team is focused primary on development and testing. There are 2 types of iterations:

release iteration
internal build iteration

Release is the process of delivering (publishing) working software to a customer. Release iterations highlight milestones when some important set of requirements is to be finished. Normally, a release iteration lasts 2-6 weeks. Internal build is the process of delivering (publishing) software to QA team. Internal builds show the progress in the development of the software. They are called daily builds as they are conducted on a daily basis.

At support phase, it is assumed that main development activities are over, all features are developed and tested, and the product got its final look. The team works on change requests and bug fixes.

Requirement-Driven Development

Requirement-Driven Development is not ultimately new agile methodology. We combined 3 best agile methods to get the one that works for us. These are:

Agile Modeling is a practice-based methodology for modeling and documentation of software-based systems. It is intended to be a collection of values, principles, and practices for modeling software that can be applied on a software development project in a more flexible manner than traditional modeling methods. Whenever we need the design, we use agile modeling.

Extreme Programming (XP) is a software engineering methodology prescribing a set of daily stakeholder practices that embody and encourage particular its values. Proponents believe that exercising these practices-traditional software engineering practices taken to so-called "extreme" levels-leads to a development process that is more responsive to customer needs ("agile") than traditional methods, while creating software of better quality. We use XP practices to build our software.

Feature-Driven Development observes client-valued functionality (feature) as the basis for building the project. It is a model-driven short-iteration process that consists of five basic activities. For accurate state reporting and keeping track of the software development project, milestones that mark the progress made on each feature are defined. The 5 FDD activities are: develop overall model, build feature list, plan by feature, design by feature and build by feature. FDD adds the necessary management layer to the development.