Are you using Matlab in an Agile development environment?

I am a researcher using Matlab, which means I am partly a programmer and so could benefit from improving how I write, document, and share code. My company is offering Agile training for our 'real' software programmers, and I am figuring out if this would be useful to me. I do some collaborative development, which seems to be the point of Agile. If you have experience using Matlab in an Agile development environment, I am curious if you find the Agile guidelines useful or not.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Yes, we use it, though I usually call it extreme programming. The alternative way where every single one of the requirements is known in advance and presented to the programmers/developers, who then do exactly that and don't show anything to the requester until it's completely done (waterfall or "throw it over the wall" style of development) just simply doesn't work in a fast paced environment where users often don't know exactly what they want, or what they want/need changes in response to other exterior factors that were not known to anyone when the project started. You don't want to work 4 months on software and then show it to them and say "Here you go, it's done, and does exactly what you asked for" only for them to say they don't like it or want it done differently. So we need to continually give the customer prototypes, and get feedback from them, and iterate until they're happy.

[Evans Harrigan]

My experience is that the programming language is orthogonal to the development methodology, including Agile.