Agile Software Development (with MATLAB): Why? How? And the Pitfalls.

A full upfront architecture and design is much like a communistic five-year plan: It does not work in practice. Having no architecture at all also does not work. The idea of agile software development is to start with some architecture and design and a feature to be implemented, then run through the full V model development cycle for this feature before continuing with the next feature. Depending on (wo)man power, multiple features may be developed simultaneously. If a full V model cycle does not fit into a single sprint, multiple features may be put in the pipeline, i.e. do the certification of feature 1 in parallel to the development of feature 2. While teams may be agile now, there are still some pitfalls: What about the architecture? Do self-organized teams really work? Is the certification authority satisfied?