Agile software development practices have been finding their way in to various industries; finance, education, government, and even games.

As programmers, we're constantly working to improve and evolve our designs. Refactoring helps us take an evolving code base and make it look like the code was designed for today's problems right from the start. And hey, it can actually be fun! It can be difficult to make small steps in a tricky bit of code, hard to figure out how to fix a particular code smell, and tricky to know when you're done.

One of the first questions we get when implementing and training agility in organizations is about accounting. So much of what happens in an organization revolves around the numbers -- risk/reward, investment/return, burn-rate, etc. Many times developers and technology management gets wrapped up in all the goodness of change and then we forget to bring the accounting folks along.

We all know that terms such as “iteration”, “project manager”, and “daily stand-up meetings” are extremely difficult for software development professionals to comprehend. To simplify things, we have created a better methodology fashioned after a metaphor of the sport of Baseball.

This article explains the fundamental principles of this revolutionary approach, the best methodology ever created because it’s brand-spanking new, named “Play Ball!”.