Abstract
In this chapter, the ADPD methodology will be presented and discussed. The name and the consequent acronym are due to the fact that I would like to create a methodology that is agile and, therefore, compliant to the Agile Manifesto, but that at the same time can be widely accepted and then also deployed in organizations that are not inclined to accept Agile development. The ADPD’s main aim is to eliminate the criticisms that often bound Agile methodologies with hacking or unstructured development. To obtain such results, the methodology must be compliant at least with the Software Capability Maturity Model, commonly known as CMM-SW (Paulk, 1993, 1993a) Level 3: the defined level. It also explains the second term of the acronym. Third and fourth terms are quite obvious and do not necessitate any further investigation. The compliance with CMM-SW Level 3 allows me to successfully apply this methodology in an environment where a standardization in terms of software or product quality is a must, since the Defined Level of CMM-SW allows you to match the requirements of most of the companies that usually do not agree with Agile methodologies and management. These are the main reasons for which I started to define a new methodology, mainly based on the concept of the first Agile methodology I have applied in real projects; that is, XP (Beck, 1999, 2000). I have inserted in ADPD all the positive aspects and techniques that are part of XP and that I was able to apply successfully in daily project management. I modified all the improvable aspects, inserting some new hints to the project manager and guaranteeing at least the compliance with CMM-SW Level 3.