Agile Is The Route To "Differentiation" Applications

Forrester Research's Diego Lo Giudice has called for a realization of the need for Agile software application development methodologies in today's modern programming shop environments.

The principal analyst VP spoke at IBM Rational's Next Generation Software Delivery forum in Sydney to explain his view of contemporary development philosophies. He asserted that Agile brings quality improvements and more opportunities for what he called "midcourse correction"; i.e., the holy grail of avoiding project skew.

Lo Giudice explains that multiple releases with smaller increments and logically fewer features (at each step) help break up monolithic projects and help deliver higher quality overall.

"[Agile] provides faster delivery by getting the 'right things' done," he said. "[But] testing in an accelerated environment without impacting Agile team performance is not easy."

The analyst also called out Agile's ability to facilitate what he calls continuous business feedback as it also opens up the door to more use of cross functional teams.

"GUI automation is not enough, so much more automation is required and done in a smarter way," Giudice said.

Finally, Lo Giudice also centered his attention on test driven development (TDD) as compared to more traditional testing and said that iterative testing increases challenges on "non functional" complex production environments. "As Agile matures, so does testing automation. Testing makes or breaks your Agile adoption," he said.