An Interview explaining the benefits of Agile Development

I'm sure like me you have heard the term Agile Programming mentioned in many blogs. I will admit that were I work we don't really have any system we use. I also find that implementing all the rules of the various systems seems a bit too much like hard work.

It seems to me like the new ideologies are based on best practices (unsurprisingly) but they all are a slightly different flavour and they all seem to miss out important parts like uml modeling, design patterns, no documentation (sounds good).

As you can tell I don't really know what I'm talking about but I'm willing to learn so when I found this link about some people talking about Agile programming and how they use it/implement it then I thought it would be interesting. The link is a page with a number of talks on, they were done in 2005 so it's not that up to date.

There are some talks/interviews where you have to register but there are some on the right hand side which are free. The interview I watched, although there is an mp3 and it's written down if you would like to read it, was

Agile Development & Agile MDA Scott Ambler and Jon Kern

The interview goes over real world experiences with agile development, lessons learned, the value of documentation, how modelling should fit into the development cycle, and more.

it tackles some interesting questions like these

1. What does it truly mean to be agile?
2. What is not agile?
3. The Agile movement has been around for a few years, what are we seeing? Where are we in the state of things?

I have to admit I quite like some of the ideas behind Agile development but don't take my word for it, listen to some people who know what they are talking about.