From the beginning of software time people have wondered why it isn't possible to accelerate
software projects by simply adding staff. This is sometimes known as the nine women can't make
a baby in one month problem. The most famous treatise declaring this to be impossible is Fred
Brooks' 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month in which he declares that adding more programmers to
a late software project makes it later and indeed this has proven largely true over the
decades.Aided by a domain-driven code generator that quickly creates database and API code
Parallel Agile (PA) achieves significant schedule compression using parallelism: as many
developers as necessary can independently and concurrently develop the scenarios from initial
prototype through production code. Projects can scale by elastic staffing rather than by
stretching schedules for larger development efforts. Schedule compression with a large team of
developers working in parallel is analogous to hardware acceleration of compute problems using
parallel CPUs.PA has some similarities with and differences from other Agile approaches. Like
most Agile methods PA gets to code early and uses feedback from executable software to drive
requirements and design. PA uses technical prototyping as a risk-mitigation strategy to help
sanity-check requirements for feasibility and to evaluate different technical architectures
and technologies.Unlike many Agile methods PA does not support design by refactoring and it
doesn't drive designs from unit tests. Instead PA uses a minimalist UML-based design approach
(Agile ICONIX) that starts out with a domain model to facilitate communication across the
development team and partitions the system along use case boundaries which enables parallel
development. Parallel Agile is fully compatible with the Incremental Commitment Spiral Model
(ICSM) which involves concurrent effort of a systems engineering team adevelopment team and
a test team working alongside the developers. The authors have been researching and refining
the PA process for several years on multiple test projects that have involved over 200
developers. The book's example project details the design of one of these test projects a
crowdsourced traffic safety system.
