To be honest, I had the misconception that agility and modeling are at the opposite poles, that agile teams right little or no documentation. That all changed once I read an article from Dr. Dobb's Journal. Some of the reasons agile teams do up-front modeling is "to answer questions around the scope that they're addressing, the relative cost and schedule, and what their technical strategy is." Another reason is to better grasp and manage the complexity of system architecture.
Some agile modeling an documentation best practices are mentioned as doing "some initial requirements and architecture envisioning early in the project to write executable specifications via a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach, to single source information whenever possible, to write documentation later in the lifecycle, to promote active stakeholder participation, to implement requirements in priority order, to include modeling in iteration/sprint planning activities, to create models and documents that are just barely good enough for the situation at hand, to model storm the details on a just-in-time (JIT) basis, to sometimes model a bit ahead to explore complex requirements, and to take a multiview approach via multiple models".
One of the complaints that exist with using agile methodologies is that they cannot be applied on large-scale projects and in large development teams. For those kind of projects, plan-driven, model-based solutions are better suited. To achieve this kind of scalability, there is an agile version of Model Driven Development (where MDA is one example of it), called AMDD or Agile Model Driven Development. The difference is that instead of creating extensive models, you create instead agile models. Furthermore, with AMDD, you do just a little of modeling, followed by a lot of coding.
Some agile modeling an documentation best practices are mentioned as doing "some initial requirements and architecture envisioning early in the project to write executable specifications via a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach, to single source information whenever possible, to write documentation later in the lifecycle, to promote active stakeholder participation, to implement requirements in priority order, to include modeling in iteration/sprint planning activities, to create models and documents that are just barely good enough for the situation at hand, to model storm the details on a just-in-time (JIT) basis, to sometimes model a bit ahead to explore complex requirements, and to take a multiview approach via multiple models".
One of the complaints that exist with using agile methodologies is that they cannot be applied on large-scale projects and in large development teams. For those kind of projects, plan-driven, model-based solutions are better suited. To achieve this kind of scalability, there is an agile version of Model Driven Development (where MDA is one example of it), called AMDD or Agile Model Driven Development. The difference is that instead of creating extensive models, you create instead agile models. Furthermore, with AMDD, you do just a little of modeling, followed by a lot of coding.
