BibSonomy ::  user :: cschie ::

However I don't think this is the key point about agile methods. Lack of documentation is a symptom of two much deeper differences: Agile methods are adaptive rather than predictive. Engineering methods tend to try to plan out a large part of the software process in great detail for a long span of time, this works well until things change. So their nature is to resist change. The agile methods, however, welcome change. They try to be processes that adapt and thrive on change, even to the point of changing themselves. Agile methods are people-oriented rather than process-oriented. The goal of engineering methods is to define a process that will work well whoever happens to be using it. Agile methods assert that no process will ever make up the skill of the development team, so the role of a process is to support the development team in their work.In the following sections I'll explore these differences in more detail, so that you can understand what an adaptive and people-centered process is like, its benefits and drawbacks, and whether it's something you should use: either as a developer or customer of software.

The success of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has created the foundation for information and service sharing across application and organizational boundaries. Through the use of SOA, organizations are demanding solutions that provide vast scalability, increased reusability of business services, and greater efficiency of computing resources. More importantly, organizations need agile architectures that can adapt to rapidly changing business requirements without the long development cycles that are typically associated with these efforts. Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) has emerged to provide more sophisticated capabilities that address these dynamic environments. EDA enables business agility by empowering software engineers with complex processing techniques to develop substantial functionality in days or weeks rather than months or years. As a result, EDA is positioned to enhance the business value of SOA. The purpose of this white paper is to describe the approach employed to overcome the significant technical challenges required to design a dynamic grid computing architecture for a US government program. The program required optimization of the overall business process while maximizing scalability to support dramatic increases in throughput. To realize this goal, an architecture was developed to support the dynamic placement and removal of business services across the enterprise.