Incremental development and release has the obvious advantage that users begin to derive value from parts of the system, presumably those parts that are critical and provide high value. At the same time, because these parts are released early, they could come with defects. Thus the second aspect of interest here is the quality of the product released. This quality-functionality trade-off is at the heart of the present study. We build a model for agile software development and choose the project duration, construction effort and incremental release policy to maximize the payoff derived by the firm. A key finding in our model is that there is focus on simultaneous construction and debugging in agile approach to make sure that incremental releases are valuable to the end user. In addition, we find support for both continuous release (developed system is always released to end-user) as well as intermittent release where depending upon how errors accrue during the software development process, the functionalities are periodically released to the end user.
Poster number: 6