Agile pushes ugliness out of the system

Agile differs from Waterfall in many ways. One significant way is that Agile handles ugliness, and Waterfall doesn't.

Agile starts by defining "ugliness" as an unmet requirement. It could be a new feature or a change to the current one. The Agile process sees the ugliness move through the system, from requirements to test to code to deployment. (Waterfall, in contrast, has the notion of requirements but not the concept of ugliness.)

Let's look at how Agile considers ugliness to be larger than just unmet requirements.

The first stage is an unmet requirement. With the Agile process, development occurs in a set of changes (sometimes called "sprints") with a small set of new requirements. Stakeholders may have a long list of unmet requirements, but a single sprint handles a small, manageable set of them. The "ugliness" is the fact that the system (as it is at the beginning of the sprint) does not perform them.

The second stage transforms the unmet requirements into tests. By creating a test -- an automated test -- the unmet requirement is documented and captured in a specific form. The "ugliness" has been captured and specified.

After capture, changes to code move the "ugliness" from a test to code. A developer changes the system to perform the necessary function, and in doing so changes the code. But the resulting code may be "ugly" -- it may duplicate other code, or it may be difficult to read.

The fourth stage (after unmet requirements, capture, and coding) is to remove the "ugliness" of the code. This is the "refactoring" stage, when code is improved without changing the functions it performs. Modifying the code to remove the ugliness is the last stage. After refactoring, the "ugliness" is gone.

The ability to handle "ugliness" is the unique capability of Agile methods. Waterfall has no concept of code quality. It can measure the number of defects, the number of requirements implemented, and even the number of lines of code, but it doesn't recognize the quality of the code. The quality of the code is simply its ability to deliver functionality. This means that ugly code can collect, and collect, and collect. There is nothing in Waterfall to address it.

Agile is different. Agile recognizes that code quality is important. That's the reason for the "refactor" phase. Agile transforms requirements into tests, then into ugly code, and finally into beautiful (or at least non-ugly) code. The result is requirements that are transformed into maintainable code.