Rapid, Evolutionary, Reliable, Scalable System and Software Development: The Resilient Agile Process

The increasing pace of change in competition, technology, and complexity of software-intensive systems has increased the demand for rapid, reliable, scalable, and evolvable processes. Agile methods have made significant contributions to speeding up software development, but often encounter problems with reliability, scalability, and evolvability. Over the past 3 years, we have been experimenting with an approach called Resilient Agile (RA), which addresses these problems while also speeding up development by finding enablers for parallel systems engineering, development, and test. This paper summarizes our experience in defining and evolving RA by applying it to three representative emergent-technology applications: Location-Based Advertising, Picture Sharing, and Bad Driver Reporting. In comparison with the mainstream Architected Agile process that we had been using on similar systems, the RA process achieved fewer defects and significant speedups in system development and evolution. The paper summarizes the overall challenge of software schedule compression; identifies managed parallel development as generally the most powerful but least-practiced strategy for schedule compression; summarizes the key elements required to support parallelism, including specific model-driven system development techniques, automatic generation of key elements and realistic schedule and effort estimation. It then summarizes the three successful Resilient Agile projects to date, provides criteria for selecting a Resilient Agile process, and summarizes the key techniques for scaling up Resilient Agile, using a previous million-line command and control project as an example.