Software Engineering Institute

The essence of stability in software development is the ability to produce quality software with infrastructure that will meet long-term business goals. The essence of rapid and agile development is the ability to deliver capabilities quickly based on customer priorities. Stability often requires cross-functional analysis and infrastructure support that will build foundational technology for the capabilities to stand on, which takes time and resources. But today's organizations must attend to both agility and enduring design. This article presents three tactics that support rapid and agile stability: aligning feature-based development and system decomposition, creating an architectural runway, and using matrix teams.