Explain how the principles underlying agile methods lead to the accelerated development and deployment of software.

What will be an ideal response?

The principles underlying agile development are:
1. Individual and interactions over processes and tools. By taking advantages
of individual skills and ability and by ensuring that the development team
know what each other are doing, the overheads of formal communication
and process assurance are avoided. This means that the team can focus on
the development of working software.
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation. This contributes to
accelerated development because time is not spent developing, checking and
managing documentation. Rather, the programmer’s time is focused on the
development and testing of code.
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Rather than spending
time developing, analyzing and negotiating requirements to be included in a
system contract, agile developers argue that it is more effective to get
feedback from customer’s directly during the development about what is
required. This allows useful functionality to be developed and delivered
earlier than would be possible if contracts were required.
4. Responding to change over following a plan. Agile developers argue
(rightly) that being responsive to change is more effective than following a
plan-based process because change is inevitable whatever process is used.
There is significant overhead in changing plans to accommodate change and
the inflexibility of a plan means that work may be done that is later
discarded.