Software development, there are many ways to go about doing it. From the waterfall model to the unified process they all seem to have their own strengths and weaknesses depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Though every model has a different way to go about development, they all have one thing in common and that is documenting every aspect of the project you are working on. All of them except for the Agile process that is.

The Agile process emphasizes less time with planning and focuses heavily on getting down to business, its also being adopted in the industry at a rapidly increasing rate. As all software development processes, it has it’s pros and cons.

The Agile process works in a rather simple way. Teams of programmers are assigned to a project, this project can be thought of as a building block to a bigger project. The team is also given a time period in order to complete said project which usually consists of one to two weeks, this time period is called a sprint. After the team completes their sprint they are then assigned another project. In the end, these projects are put together in order to make one fully functioning program.

Though the process seems simple enough and has proven to be effective it is vastly different due to the lack of documentation. Developers are essentially given a project then rushed to get it completed. Meaning when a future problem occurs and something needs to be touched up and fixed there is little to no documentation for developers to go off of in order to fix it.

Now most software bugs aren’t that big of a deal and they’re easily fixable without catastrophic repercussions. But some of them are and we don’t need another terrible incident like the Therac-25.

How do you feel about Agile development?