An agile application is the result of

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provide ...

and

agile development In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ad ...

paradigms. An agile application is distinguished from average applications in that it is a

loosely coupled In computing and systems design, a loosely coupled system is one # in which components are weakly associated (have breakable relationships) with each other, and thus changes in one component least affect existence or performance of another comp ...

set of services with a decoupled orchestration layer and it is easily modified to address changing business needs and it is scalable by design. Using agile applications development paradigms, a set of services can be built to address business specific functional components. These services can be exposed using any one of the standard communication protocols including web services. A well designed agile application will standardize on a common communication protocol and a

common data model A common data model (CDM) can refer to any standardised data model which allows for data and information exchange between different applications and data sources. Common data models aim to standardise logical infrastructure so that related applicat ...

. The services can then be orchestrated using a decoupled layer to implement business logic. There are many tools by different vendors (IBM, Intel etc.,) in the industry that can support the orchestration layer. The decoupled nature of an agile application permits it to accommodate

fault tolerance Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

and

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

. For example, scalability is addressed through focusing the attention of the QA team in the set of services that are causing the bottleneck as opposed to trying to solve scalability for the entire system which can be a much bigger problem. Similarly, fault tolerance can be achieved through deploying multiple instances of a service. If one service fails, another instance can pick up the load. For stateless services, this can lead to continuous availability. Following the Agile Development paradigm, each unit of

development cycle In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

can be focused on a single service. Furthermore, multiple of these development cycles can run in parallel leading to faster development completion. Agile is a means of responsiveness based on customization rather than stable production or standardization.

References

Further reading

See also