5 Ways To Go Agile In Your Software Development

What’s the best way of creating a relevant, high-quality software product? Some say it’s agile development. What’s so good about it? Saving money is not the forte of agile development (although there are ways to do it). The main thing is the flexibility of the process and of the product itself – vital relevance for the market.

A quick glance at the main values of the agile approach will allow you to understand whether it suits you and your own business approach:

• Individuals and interactions provide the self-organization and sharing of ideas and experience for the sake of the product quality.

• Working software is more important than comprehensive documentation, which rather distinguishes the waterfall model. You don’t deploy documentation – you deploy the product. Your users don’t need documentation – they need a great product to use. On the other hand we’d never underestimate the importance of every piece of documentation you have. Although the working result is of higher priority, you should invest into documentation to get the working software faster and with fewer problems on the way.

• Customer collaboration is required to keep the requirements relevant and clarify them in the process of development. You need to communicate with your software company to know that they are building exactly what you want – meanwhile they are sure they are building the product the way you want. Fruitful collaboration is valued over negotiating contract details – a must for result-oriented teams.

• Responding to change means everything in the mobile world. Your product doesn’t run the risks to become dated or incompatible with your business or the mobile environment.

Most software companies embrace agile development, and they apply certain frameworks and methodologies to making your product. Here are five popular ways to go agile.

Scrum

Scrum is a widely used framework to manage projects incrementally: the whole project cycle is divided into short periods of time (sprints), at the end of each the Product Owner receives a tangible part of software. One sprint usually lasts 2 weeks. Goals for each subsequent sprint are based on the results achieved at the previous one, they are discussed and approved by the Product Owner.

Whatever is the amount of work, Scrum allows to divide and manage it efficiently, putting the common output of the team to the forefront. Other priorities are communication, transparency of actions, self-organization and motivation. It also values considering technological and business conditions to push the project in the right direction, keeping the work process structured but avoiding excessive bureaucracy.

Put all this together, and you’ll get the flexibility to make and maintain a relevant product (satisfaction of the Product Owner’s demands), effective planning of the budget (due to iterational approach), and convenience for the development team, where each voice is valued.

Kanban

Kanban is a technique that prioritizes ‘just-in-time’ delivery of the software product, inspired by Toyota production system. Although creating software is by no means a mass-production like making cars, there are certain mechanisms that can be applied in both processes. It’s an assembly line where feature requests enter and an improved piece of software comes at the end.

The bottleneck of this line is the limitation. If developers are able to build 4 features over a period of time, and QA can test not more than 3 over the same period, then 3 is the maximum. Nevertheless it’s easy to define where the bottleneck is (by limiting work-in-progress), and cover the limitations by hiring or redeploying human resources – thus you get efficiency.

Visualization of the workflow (as a card wall with cards and columns) allows to manage changes and implement them as planned.

Extreme Programming (XP)

XP is a methodology of software development, intending to boost quality of software and responsiveness to inevitable changes. It involves short and frequent iterations with unit testing of all code, pair programming (continuous reviewing of the code). Nothing is coded until it’s needed. The common drawback of this approach is the instability of requirements and lack of overall documentation.

5 core values of extreme programming relate to agile in general: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect. Communication can include the documentation required from the beginning. Simplicity in coding makes it understandable to any other developer; all extra features can be left for later. Feedback is appreciated from both the team and the end users. Courage must be high enough to rid of the obsolete, irrelevant code, whatever the effort to create it was. Respect applies to the experience and ideas of everyone in the team.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

The main principles behind DSDM are: focus on the business need (delivering the business benefit early); continuous involvement of users; keeping quality at a high level as a must; transparent and proactive control; and building the product iteratively with continuous communication; and timely delivery – the whole scope of work is divided into musts, shoulds, colds, and won’t haves in order to meet the deadlines.

Feature-Driven Development (FDD)

Feature-driven development is yet another incremental process, which involves 5 basic activities: developing overall model, building a list of features, then planning, designing, and implementing by feature.

The approach unites a set of industry-recognized best practices of software engineering – and the whole became a praised method to timely develop and deliver working software to its owner.

Agile approaches work for software like nothing else, and cover the majority of troubles on the way. All else depends on the agile software company you choose, and your own efforts – you need to work closely for the best result. Pay attention to project managers who wield the mastery of agile – for example, there are such certifications as PSM (Professional Scrum Master), which are the perfect proof of your PM’s capabilities.

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