Divide after you conquer: an agile software development practice for large projects

  • Authors:
  • Ahmed Elshamy;Amr Elssamadisy

  • Affiliations:
  • ThoughtWorks Inc., Chicago, IL;Valtech Technologies, Addison, TX

  • Venue:
  • XP'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Large software development projects are not agile by nature. Large projects are not easy to implement, they are even harder to implement using agile methodologies. Based on over 6 years of experience building software systems using agile methodologies we found that we can modify agile methodologies to be successfully applied to large projects. In this paper, we will introduce a development practice, which we call Divide After You Conquer to reduce some of the challenges during the development of large agile projects. By solving the base problem first with a smaller development team (Conquer phase) before expanding the team to its full size (Divide phase) we can solve many of the problems that occur with larger projects using agile methodologies.