Russell Pannone was asked, "Does quality assurance have a place in agile software development?" His knee-jerk answer was yes, but what form and function quality management takes depends on many factors.

Creative achievement is typically associated with individual effort. Think of Newton, Edison, or Leonardo Da Vinci. Until not very long ago, creativity and design were the focus of a few, while the work of the masses was broken down into repeatable steps. Creativity was perceived to undermine the result of mass-production. Today, the work depends on the design and creative skills of the knowledge workers that perform it

Software development is currently being "driven". This article finds existing X-Driven Development approaches wanting because they focus on too narrow an aspect of development and, primarily, because they are grounded in the wrong philosophy of what exactly software development "is". An alternative—theorY Driven-Development - YDD—addressing the "essential difficulty" of development is proposed. How YDD represents an evolutionary step for Agile is argued.

When XDx's Software Group adopted an agile approach to application development, we achieved the fastest development time on any software project in the company's history. While we expected to shorten development time and reduce costs, we discovered that agile provides several hidden benefits. Beyond its value as a software development methodology, our agile platform is a tool that enables and improves communication with our users which has been a key success factor, because user groups have a hard time thinking in the software development terms imposed by the traditional waterfall method of upfront specification. This improved communication has helped everyone to let go of complete up-front specifications and trust the agile process.