Agile Development

Many IT managers find themselves in the difficult position of seeking to “disrupt” the way their organization has traditionally confronted software development. Often this is a felt need more than a simple curiosity: they realize their organization is not rolling product fast enough to market, or that their services are lagging behind competitors. In short, […]

Based on my 13+ years of experience as a professional software developer; I would like to discuss about “Agile”; its virtues and its dangers, its myths and misconceptions, its pros and cons; and also some of the common pitfalls I have encounter during the years. Agile, not Agile? What the Heck are we Talking About? […]

Many IT managers resist the temptation of going agile (which implies working under a time and materials model) because they believe their managers, or their purchasing department, or whoever approves a budgetary expenditure, will not easily approve a T & M project. It is easy to see that for someone who has not been directly […]

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to facilitate retrospectives for several software development teams within Perficient Latin America and gained some insights and lessons learned that I would like to share. One of the most common issues for the teams which I’ve facilitated retrospectives is that they did not schedule retrospective […]

This is Part 6 of the series of articles “Why go Agile?” When first introduced to Agile, clients often react with phrases like “ok, from a technical perspective this makes sense, but how do I sell this to my CEO?” Perficient Latin America believes Agile methodologies should be seen under a stage-gate scenario, where commitments […]

This is Part 5 of the series of articles “Why go Agile?” The philosophy of Agile Software Development sounds very nice in theory, but how does it stack up in practice? At Perficient Latin America, as nearshore/offshore software development vendors, we have deployed dozens of agile SCRUM projects large and small, and have seen for […]

This is Part 4 of the series of articles “Why go Agile?” Yes, there certainly is a better way to do software development. And at Perficient Latin America we believe it is Agile, specifically under SCRUM. More than a development methodology, Agile answers to a philosophy and a perspective on what software development really is. […]

This is Part 3 of the series of articles “Why go Agile?” In essence, RUP and the waterfall approach, even when done under judicious process discipline, still attempted to be predictive software development methodologies. That is to say, they wanted to predict in advance, before beginning the project, matters such as: what the cost of […]

This is Part 2 of the series of articles “Why go Agile?” Well into the 1980s the largest buyer of software development services in the world, the US Department of Defense, was having trouble getting projects done on time, on budget and with the right specifications. Despite working with some of the best and most […]

This is Part 1 of the series of articles “Why go Agile?” This new series of posts tries to explore a question that clients often ask us… Why develop their software using Agile methodologies? Many clients, even many software development practitioners, have heard about SCRUM or XP. But, as with many trends, it is difficult […]

Let’s go back in time: Think about any software that you’ve ever given a user. You have an idea to build a system to aid a painful business process in your organization. You fight with management to get a massive budget to be able to build the system. You then go through the entire painful […]