Agile development methods poised to upset status quo

Because of the increased emphasis on the criteria for objectives and assessment , a more in-depth look at this topic will be the subject of a future column. One of the most exciting events of the past year has been the emergence of criteria for accrediting information systems programs. This effort has received funding from the National Science Foundation and is being conducted under the auspices of CSAB. The first evaluation of an information systems program will take place during the fall of 2001. You can :review the proposed criteria for :information systems programs at <http://www.csab.urg>. One column is simply not enough to examine the changes and initiatives in accreditation thoroughly. Nor is it enough to explain why your institution should pursue accreditation of its computing programs or how to pursue it. We trust that this column has piqued your interest in learning more. Join me for future columns in a journey that will explore the criteria, process, and issues of accreditation in more depth. R wemember when programming as fun? Is this how you got J L ~k.interested in computers in the first place and later in computer sci-ence? Is this why many of our majors enter the discipline-because they like to program computers? Well, there may be promising and respectable software development methodologies that are perfectly suited to these kinds of folks-folks who like to program and who want to develop good software , and want to start coding almost right away. ("Yikes!" gasps the software engineering instructor.) We have studied software engineering in the "traditional" way for many years and bought into the Personal Software Process [1], the Team Software Process [1], the Capability Maturity Model [2], and the Unified Process [1]. Now here comes a new craze sweeping the software development world. Actually, it is not a craze, but a formalization of practical, "common-sense practices" [4, page xv] that have been used on many real-world software projects quite successfully [4]. We call these "new" methods agile. (Actually, these methods aren't that new, as the debates and discussions have been raging between the anarchists [6], as the agile proponents call themselves, and the pro-status-quo software engineers for a few years [5].) In their article "The Agile Manifesto," Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith [6] briefly describe these new "lighter" approaches to building software. The underlying philosophy is that not all software projects lend themselves to having requirements completely …