...just might be The Stig ;-)

Agile software development is a conceptual framework for undertaking software engineering projects that embraces and promotes evolutionary change throughout the entire life-cycle of the project.

Tips for an Agile Developer

1. Blame doesn’t fix bugs
2. Don’t fall for the quick hack
3. Criticize ideas, not people
4. Do what’s right
5. Keep up with changing technology
6. Raise the bar for you and your team
7. Learn the new; unlearn the old
8. Keep asking why
9. Tackle tasks before they bunch up
10. Let your customers decide
11. A good design is a map; let it evolve
12. Choose technology based on need
13. Keep your project releasable at all times
14. Integrate early, integrate often
15. Deploy your application automatically from the start
16. Develop in plain sight
17. Develop in increments
18. Estimate based on real work
19. Use automated unit tests
20. Use it before you build it
21. Different makes a difference
22. Create tests for core business logic
23. Measure how much work is left
24. Every complaint holds a truth
25. Write code to be clear, not clever
26. Comment to communicate
27. Actively evaluate trade-offs
28. Write code in short edit/build/test cycles
29. Develop the simplest solution that works
30. Keep classes focused and components small
31. Tell, don’t ask
32. Extend systems by substituting code
33. Maintain a log of problems and their solutions
34. Treat warnings as errors
35. Attack problems in isolation
36. Handle or propogate all exceptions
37. Present useful error messages
38. Use stand-up meetings
39. Good design evolves from active programmers
40. Emphasize collective ownership of code
41. Be a mentor
42. Give others a chance to solve problems
43. Share code only when ready
44. Review all code
45. Keep other informed

reference: practices of an agile developer, pragmatic programmers

Scrum

• A product backlog of prioritized work to be done;
  Completion of a fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints;
• A brief daily meeting or scrum, at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised.
• A brief sprint planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined.
• A brief sprint retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint.

Extreme Programming (XP)

• An attempt to reconcile humanity and productivity
• A mechanism for social change
• A path to improvement
• A style of development
• A software development discipline

Waterfall Model

The waterfall model is a sequential software development model (a process for the creation of software) in which development is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through it’s phases;

1. Requirements specification
2. Design
3. Construction (aka: implementation or coding)
4. Integration
5. Testing and debugging (aka: verification)
6. Installation
7. Maintenance

As you can see the more Agile methods like Scrum and XP offer development teams the ability to evolve their products and bring them to market faster with a greater emphasis on rolling development and successive betas boiling down to a final solution.

Enjoy,

John.