Summary

In this chapter, we set a primary goal for this book of identifying the sweet spot between agile, feedback-driven software processes and disciplined, plan-driven software processes. We then dissected a software process into its subcomponents and analyzed each subcomponent individually, discussing the trade-offs that you can make within each layer. We followed that with a “fact or fiction” discussion that focused on the human-centric communication issues related to software process.

The next chapter presents a brief introduction to ICONIX Process, a use case–driven approach that uses a minimalist core subset of UML. In Chapter 4, we’ll next attempt to define a minimalist core subset of agile practices. Then we’ll see how close we came to the sweet spot by exploring the design and code for our example project.