Software Engineering

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CHAPTER 6 
Impediments to Software Design
The Agile-driven software development model is a result of years of frustration 
on the part of software professionals who could not understand why software devel-
opment was so difficult and failure-prone. Therefore, the proponents of Agile have 
established a guild of software professionals whom have come to believe that the 
incremental delivery of an evolving product is delivering value to the customer. To 
“sell” this methodology they insulated themselves from the most problematic ele-
ments associated with software development:
●
  Deriving a complete set of requirements before the coding begins.
●
  Focusing on incremental delivery versus a comprehensive project plan.
●
  Ignoring the need to design and document the software product.
Less time wasted on unnecessary overhead tasks and more time spent fixing the 
product so it works.
Conversely, these problematic elements associated with software development 
happen to be the competencies of software engineering. Software engineering pro-
vides the basis for coalescing stakeholder needs and expectations into a complete 
and consistent set of software requirements. Changes to the established software 
requirements baseline are interrogated against the software architecture, project 
plans, and resource allocation to ensure that a proposed change can be accom-
modated. Changes that are necessary can be incorporated into the technical plans 
FIGURE 6.6
Agile-driven software development model.

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