Scott W. Ambler

With all of agile's documented successes, the methodologies are being used in areas never before seen. Scott W. Ambler looks into why agile is as popular as it is, and why its popularity will only increase in the future.

One of the common misperceptions with agile software development is that agilists don't "do architecture." This completely ignores the 11th principle of the Agile Manifesto which states that the best architectures evolve over time. In this article Scott Ambler overviews an agile practice called "architecture envisioning" which enables you to gain the value from modeling without the cost of needless documentation.

Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) is a common strategy in the software world today. Organizations are gaining experience in developing software globally and are discovering that the competitive demand for best-in-class, high quality applications requires greater agility in quality management. Unfortunately, IT budgets are not keeping up with the staff required for quality management and the response is to accelerate quality management by leveraging global teams. This article compares and contrasts agile GDD testing strategies for affecting quality management.

Every system has an architecture, even systems developed using agile methodologies. Whether you attempt to define that architecture up front in detail or whether it emerges over time is up to you. My experience is that most agile teams follow a strategy somewhere between these two extremes. That strategy, combined with proving your architectural ideas as soon as possible through working code. This article summarizes a collection of strategies for addressing architectural concerns on agile projects and discusses how such strategies can be applied to scale agile methods to large development efforts.