A survey of agile methodologies

The failure of software development projects has been a cause for concern for a long time. South Africa's software development industry is no exception. In fact, in South Africa the majority of the software development organizations are small to medium sized. Some even have one developer developing large systems. As is common with software development organizations, most of the applications are developed without following any development methodology and sometimes without following any project management methodology. This scenario leaves the South African industry prone to failures and catastrophes that have devastated the software industry for many years. This review aims to bring an awareness of an emerging software development discipline called Agile methodologies that claims to deal adequately with issues such as the social side of software development, where the interactions among developers, users, customers, managers and the proposed system actually affect the quality, cost, and time of software development.