Benefits of Agile Software Development
In the world of IT, it is now very common to hear the term “Agile” frequently. Agile Software Development is a method of developing software solutions, web and mobile applications, that focuses on delivering high-quality working software frequently and consistently, while minimizing project overhead and increasing business value.
This is the definition of agile process, and prior to expanding on process and how agile software development approach can improve the effectiveness and quality of your next software development project, it is important to know the basic elements of this methodology, such as life cycle and workflow.
The Agile approach allows teams to break the lengthy requirements, build, and test phases down into smaller segments, ultimately delivering working software quickly and more frequently. Organizations are experiencing enormous success in meeting the fast-paced change of customer needs by adopting the Agile software development methodology. Some of the main methods used by software developers include Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Adaptive Software Development (ASD), Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban, Extreme Programming (XP), Dynamic Systems Development (DSDM), Feature Driven Development, and Lean Software Development. Keep in mind that each methodology has slight variations in the way it defines the phases of software development and team’s process flow may vary depending on the specific project or situation. All agile methodologies aim to deliver working software as quickly as possible.
Following is the basic agile development lifecycle and process flow which most agile methodologies share in common:
- Concept – Projects are envisioned and prioritized. It’s important to understand a client’s vision and background when starting any new project. Agile software development projects start with a series of discovery sessions and research to understand a client’s goals, and challenges. These sessions include key members of the project team including the client, project manager, designer, developer, and product owner to ensure a shared understanding across the entire team.
- Discovery, the team works together to create a high-level Product Backlog, a wish list of all the features that would be useful to the client and their users. The product owner works with the team to prioritize these features, determining the order in which the features are elaborated, developed, tested, and delivered. By allowing the client to determine priority, the team stays focused on delivering the highest value features before moving on to lower value features.
- Inception – Team members are identified, funding is put in place, and initial environments and requirements are discussed.
- Iteration – After ensuring the team understands the client’s vision and has created a high level backlog of features, the team delivers features through a series of time-boxed iterations called Sprints. These are fixed duration of 1-4 weeks depending on the project size and duration, each delivering a subset of the overall product backlog.
- Construction – The development team works to deliver working software based on iteration requirements and feedback.
- Release – QA (Quality Assurance) testing, user acceptance test, internal and external training.
- Continuing sprints / iteration – Additional sprints are conducted as needed to deliver additional features and incorporate feedback from previous iterations, reviews, and user beta testing. Each successive sprint is both Iterative, providing improvements to work completed in previous sprints; and incremental, adding new features to the system.
- Production – Ongoing support of the software
- Retirement – End-of-life activities, including customer notification and migration.
A typical iteration or sprint micro process flow can be visualized as requirements, development, testing, delivery, and feedback.
There may be projects operating simultaneously, multiple sprints/iterations on different product lines, communication with a variety of internal & external customers with a range of business needs. Incorporating Agile methodologies into your software development process can have a big impact on the overall success of your program, as well as the interim usefulness of your investment. Feedback and correction can occur quickly to fix small glitches before they become big problems. Communication throughout the process is also improved by the Agile approach to project management. Overall, Agile provides a lean and effective model for the successful development of software.
Now let’s highlight the main objective of this blog, the principal benefits of implementing agile software development:
Product-Owner Engagement: Agile methodology provides multiple opportunities for product-owner and team engagement, before, during, and after each sprint. By involving the internal and/or external client in every step of the project, there is a high degree of collaboration between all members, providing more opportunities to truly understand the project vision. Delivering working software early and frequently increases product-owner ̈s trust in the team’s ability to deliver high-quality software and encourages them to be more engaged in the project.
Key Features First: Agile allows us to prioritize and focus on the items that provide the biggest impact to the business to provide value faster.By creating smaller iterations, the team is able to focus on providing value without needing to get all the requirements up front. At the end of each iteration the team will review the backlog of features and reprioritize where they should invest time in the next sprint.
Better Productivity: The incremental nature of the agile method means that projects are completed in shorter sprints, making them more manageable. It also allows products to be rolled out quickly and changes to be easily made at any point during the process.
Early and Predictable Delivery: By using time-boxed, fixed schedule Sprints of 1-4 weeks, new features are delivered quickly and frequently, with a high level of predictability. This also provides the opportunity to release or beta test the software earlier than planned if there is sufficient business value.
Collaborative Environment: Agile values individuals, interactions and customer collaboration. All team members have buy-in the entire way. The success of the project relies on acknowledging and optimizing each person’s subject matter expertise. An Agile approach provides a unique opportunity for product owner and clients to be involved throughout the project, from prioritizing features to iteration planning and review sessions to frequent software builds containing new features.
Predictable Costs and Schedule: Because each sprint is a fixed duration, the cost is predictable and limited to the amount of work that can be performed by the team in the fixed-schedule time box. Combined with the estimates provided to the client prior to each iteration, the client can more readily understand the approximate cost of each feature, which improves decision making about the priority of features and the need for additional iterations.
Better Quality: Because it is iterative, one big benefit of agile methodology is the ability to find problems and create solutions quickly and efficiently. By breaking down the project into manageable units, the project team can focus on high-quality development, testing, and collaboration. Also, by producing frequent builds and conducting testing and reviews during each iteration, quality is improved by finding and fixing defects quickly and identifying expectation mismatches early. The flexibility of the agile method allows project teams to respond to customer reaction and constantly improve the product.
Higher Return on Investment: By allowing the client to determine the priority of features, the team understands what’s most important to the client’s business, and can deliver the features that provide the most business value. The shorter agile methodology iterative means the end product is ready for market faster, staying ahead of the competition and quickly reaping benefits. The benefits of the agile methodology are cutting costs and time to market, while increasing application quality and customer satisfaction.
Allows for Change: While the team needs to stay focused on delivering an agreed-to subset of the product’s features during each iteration, there is an opportunity to constantly refine and reprioritize the overall product backlog. New or changed backlog items can be planned for the next iteration, providing the opportunity to introduce changes within a few weeks.
As a quick rap up, Agile is a powerful tool for software development, not only providing benefits to the development team, but also providing a number of important business benefits to the product owner. Agile helps project teams deal with many of the most common project failures, such as scope, cost, product quality, and schedule predictability in a more controlled manner.