Balancing agility and discipline: evaluating and integrating agile and plan-driven methods

Rapid change and increasing software criticality drive successful development and acquisition organizations to balance the agility and discipline of their key processes. The emergence of agile methods in the software community is raising the expectations of customers and management, but the methods have shortfalls and their compatibility with traditional plan-driven methods such as those represented by CMMI, ISO-15288, and UK-DefStan-00-55 is largely unexplored. This paper pragmatically examines the aspects of agile and plan-driven methods and provides an approach to balancing through examples and case studies.