Agile Development in the Real World

CHAPTER 4

Preparing the Project

Some Upfront Work Is Necessary

In the early days of agile, agilists wanted to avoid all upfront work before the iterations of requirements, coding, and testing started: no architecture, no initial requirements, not even getting their development environment set up. (The emergent design fans still use this approach.) I think this is an overreaction to the waterfall method. The pendulum of popular development style swung from too-much-upfront work to no-upfront work. Fortunately, that pendulum is swinging back to some upfront work that some agilists call upfront learning. ¹

Early agilists’ argued that developing detailed ...