Adobe uses Agile Development Successfully to build Photoshop CS3 product
What if you read a news story that the new Adobe CS3 product was developed using Agile Development Techniques?
A notable quote (my highlighting for interesting points):
"Did it change the way you put out betas?
An automatic process builds the program every night and runs a set of tests before posting the build on our internal servers for QE to test. We could take almost any of those daily builds and use them for demos.
The public beta was basically just "whatever build is ready on date X". There were only a couple of "we really gotta fix this before we send out the public beta" bugs. With past versions, we couldn't have done a public beta at all that far ahead of release - there would have been far too many bugs.
We weren't swamped with a pile of bugs from the hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded - it really was in the good shape we thought it was. With several hundred thousand downloads, there were fewer than 25 new bugs found.
Overall, did you end up with fewer bugs, more bugs, the same number of bugs fixed faster? Did you have to sacrifice features to work this way?
Some people feared this would mean fewer features. That hasn't been the case. We certainly had far fewer bugs overall and fewer during mid-cycle (about a third less in total last time I checked). Better quality, plenty of features, fewer nights and weekends: what's not to like?"
[Via Jeffery]