To keep pace with ever-increasing customer demands on software functionality and time-to-market expectations, software developers have had to evolve the way they develop code to be both faster and higher quality. As part of this trend, the Waterfall method of software development began to give way in the late 1990s to a more lightweight method of software development: Agile.

The use of Agile has grown in the last decade and is still maturing. Software organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve their Agile environments, and minimizing software bugs is one area of focus. This paper will demonstrate that several of the core principles of Agile cannot be fully realized without implementing a repeatable process for ensuring code that is as bug-free as possible. The approach recommended in this paper is the use of automated source code analysis (SCA) technology to locate and describe areas of weakness in software source code, such as security vulnerabilities, logic errors, implementation defects, concurrency violations, rare boundary conditions, or any number of other types of problem-causing code.

After providing brief overviews of Agile and SCA, and discussing the importance of bug-free code in enabling Agile development, this paper demonstrates how key elements of SCA enhance the Agile development processes and empower Agile teams. You will learn the relationship between bug-free code and Agile development, as well as how to deploy SCA tools seamlessly into your Agile development process to ensure that it runs at peak optimization.