Although software development entails many activities closely intertwined with the domain of the system under development, present-day IDEs offer mostly generic features targeting programming in general. In this talk we look at three different ways in which software development can be tailored to be more domain-specific, and thus, more effective. First, we consider « agile modeling » — how to rapidly model complex and heterogeneous software with the help of a new approach to robust parsing; second, we look at « architectural monitoring » by showing how a unified domain-specific architectural modeling language can serve as a front-end to a range of different kinds of architectural constraints and checking tools; and finally, we consider « agile tooling » — how to rapidly create or adapt development tools to suit a given application domain. These activities are part of « Agile Software Assessment », a research project funded by the Swiss NSF.