Software professionals know how hard it is to manage successfully a project, and how easy it is to overrun budget or deadlines or not to meet customer expectations. In the late '80s and early '90s, the answer to these problems was, "Do more"—more process, more documentation. This approach has never been very popular among developers, who are more interested in developing code. Also, the usual problems continued to appear.

Since the late '90s, the approach advocated by the agile movement has been, "Do less." Or maybe, "Do smarter," using fewer documents and more automation. Smarter requirements, such as interaction with the customers and test cases, instead of requirement documents. Automated test cases, instead of test documents. Smarter, continuous quality assurance such as pair programming and test driven development. Smarter design with simple designs and refactoring and continuous integration, instead of design documents and integration plans.

I've gathered several articles that show evidence of how the agile approach works, what its results are, and how practitioners can use it. Two of these articles, from IEEE Software magazine, will be available for free on Computing Now throughout June. "Tests and Requirements, Requirements and Tests: A Möbius Strip," by Robert C. Martin and Grigori Melnik, is an introduction to FIT tables, a technique to define test cases as requirements (or requirements as test cases). "Agile Requirements Engineering Practices: An Empirical Study," by Lan Cao and Balasubramaniam Ramesh, provides an analysis of agile requirements engineering approaches, all based on an iterative discovery approach and intense communication between developers and customers. A third free article, from IT Professional, gives an overview of agile software development.

I've also provided links to several other agile-themed articles from IEEE Software and Computer. This figure provides a guide to reading these articles.

Maurizio Morisio is an associate professor in the Department of Automation and Computer Science, Politecnico di Torino. He's IEEE Software's associate editor in chief for online initiatives. Contact him at maurizio dot morisio at polito dot it.