This white paper discusses reducing software development costs. It was written by a member of the IBM Rational software services team and touches on a metaphor for software development that resonates with those tasked with building software. In many organizations it is assumed that software development can carried out like the construction of a building. This white paper explains why this comparison can’t be used. In software development terms, we call that approach “Waterfall.” The author explores this metaphor and other topics of software development economics that result in lower delivery costs including:
- Why Agile produces about half the scrap and rework of waterfall projects
- Compares Top 10 Waterfall Principles to Top 10 Iterative Development Principles
- Four discriminating patterns that are characteristic of successful Agile delivery projects
- Four basic parameters to simplify estimation
- Why waterfall can’t work
- Comparing software development to movie production versus constructing a building
- Summarize the history of best-practice evolution of various Software Development Life Cycle approaches
- The greatest risk and advantage in building software
- Summary of 30 years of process improvement which include; spiral development, incremental development, evolutionary development, iterative development and agile development, and why none of the improvements were based on waterfall
- The high cost of integration testing and how to reduce it
- Top 10 Ten Principles of Agile at scale
In our opinion, this Agile white paper is an excellent read for anyone in software delivery.