Lessons in agility from Internet-based development

Abstract

This article describes the experiences of two Internet startup companies adopting effective and efficient modeling and documentation practices. Both organizations successfully developed agile approaches for enterprise architectural modeling, one taking a communal team-based approach and the other a chief-architect approach. They adopted similar strategies for project-level modeling, adopting highly iterative and incremental approaches that focused on modeling and not on the resulting models themselves. There is a "sweet spot" where modeling efforts can provide significant benefit without incurring the costs of onerous documentation.