Agile development, a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, can be a terrifying prospect to the uninitiated. A project without budgets or deadlines seems impossible to manage, but Agile methodologies acknowledge the reality of any development lifecycle.

“It’s really semantics,” says Dinakar Vasanthakumar, Group CIO at the Logikal Group. “Agile, waterfall, ASAP, SDLC, free-form, extreme development and so on. With over a dozen years in the IT and consulting world, let me clarify that there’s no way any piece of code, logic or functionality can ever be brought out into this world without a reality check every so often. What does a proof of concept or a prototype attempt to do? What does the solution manager in SAP attempt to provide? It really offers a glimpse of what will be the end state of a product.”