A brief report on working smarter with Agile software development

Agile software development methods have proven to be a substantial catalyst for improvements in software quality, speed of delivery, and fitness for use, and are a driver behind the IBM Smarter Planet™ initiative, which involves intelligent approaches that address the needs of a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected and instrumented. Software vendors who use a traditional or waterfall approach (i.e., sequential software development process) for requirement analysis and development often find that they cannot react with sufficient speed to meet rapidly changing market demand. As a result, stakeholders must wait for the vendor to complete a lengthy development cycle, which, when complete, may miss the market window for the software or fail to adequately address other needs of these stakeholders. Agile development methods, as practiced across geographically diverse and broad development teams at IBM, directly address this issue. One purpose of this paper is simply to provide a brief high-level overview and record of the adoption of these practices and methods across a large company, i.e., the IBM Corporation.