Adaptive software development (ASD) is asoftware development process that grew out of the work byJim Highsmith and Sam Bayer onrapid application development (RAD). It embodies the principle that continuous adaptation of the process to the work at hand is the normal state of affairs.
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Adaptive software development replaces the traditionalwaterfall cycle with a repeating series ofspeculate,collaborate, andlearn cycles. This dynamic cycle provides for continuous learning and adaptation to the emergent state of the project. The characteristics of an ASD life cycle are that it is mission focused, feature based,iterative,timeboxed, risk driven, and change tolerant. As with RAD, ASD is also an antecedent toagile software development.
The wordspeculate refers to theparadox of planning – it is more likely to assume that allstakeholders are comparably wrong for certain aspects of the project’s mission, while trying to define it. During speculation, the project is initiated and adaptive cycle planning is conducted.Adaptive cycle planning uses project initiation information—the customer’smission statement, project constraints (e.g., delivery dates or user descriptions), andbasic requirements—to define the set of release cycles (software increments) thatwill be required for the project.
Collaboration refers to the efforts for balancing the work based on predictable parts of the environment (planning and guiding them) and adapting to the uncertain surrounding mix of changes caused by various factors, such as technology, requirements, stakeholders, software vendors. Thelearning cycles, challenging all stakeholders, are based on the short iterations with design, build and testing. During these iterations the knowledge is gathered by making small mistakes based on false assumptions and correcting those mistakes, thus leading to greater experience and eventually mastery in the problem domain.[1]