Agile is a software development methodology characterized by its principles and practices. These practices include requirements discovery, solutions improvement, and collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Agile teams also include end users. These practices help companies to develop products and services quickly. Moreover, agile practices are easy to adopt and boost a company’s productivity and profitability.
Principles
Agile methodology stresses the importance of customer-centricity and small, repeatable work cycles. It requires teams to be multi-skilled and continuously improve their performance. It emphasizes feedback from stakeholders and a continuous improvement cycle, ultimately ensuring a high-quality product. Agile teams also focus on delivering value to customers and maximizing client satisfaction.
Agile principles call for organizations to remove barriers between business users and developers. As a result, they promote continuous software delivery. This means fewer releases, fewer bugs, and more frequeclient feedback. This principle has several advantages, including lower costs and better ROI. The following are some of its benefits. They include:
Agile methods are based on the principles of the Agile Manifesto, which are four foundational values and twelve supporting principles. These principles are used to build software that meets the needs of business stakeholders. Agile methodology has several frameworks, but all use the Agile Manifesto as the basis for their processes.
Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto is a document that outlines the principles of successful project management. It contains four core values and 12 principles to help project managers produce extraordinary products while adhering to project constraints. Seventeen software engineers first developed the document in 2001. These engineers, known as the Agile Alliance, sought to challenge the status quo and improve project management.
In the 1990s, lightweight frameworks began to take over the software development industry. Previously, organizations would spend years planning and building a solution only to find that the problem had changed and rendered the original solution useless. To address this issue, engineers looked to more flexible ways to create software. A common phrase is “plans are nothing; flexibility is everything.”
The Agile Manifesto emphasizes collaboration with customers as a critical element of the development process. It sees this method as superior to contract negotiation, which involves defining the requirements of a product with the customer before a project begins and then renegotiating the requirements at a later stage. This process removes the opportunity for valuable customer engagement during the development cycle and prevents development teams from getting valuable feedback. In contrast, customer collaboration allows teams to solicit customer feedback early and often, giving developers valuable insights into improving their products and services.
Practices
Agile teams should always keep their client informed of the status of their work. Continuous communication between the team and the client helps ensure customer satisfaction. Agile teams can also use practices like Behavior-Driven Development to shorten their feedback loop. In this method, the team writes specifications that can be checked against actual behavior.
Estimating the total effort for each feature or sprint is essential by using the product backlog story points. Having a smaller estimate reduces the risk of getting something wrong. As a result, most agile teams estimate the effort required per story point and measure their velocity in story points. This allows the team to track how much work they’ve accomplished in each iteration.
A shared commitment drives agile projects to the principles and values. A group of software developers developed the principles with practical experience in software development. They derived several practices from other popular frameworks and committed them to write in 2001. They emphasize the importance of putting people first.
Scaling
Agile scaling is a method for deploying agile methodologies across an enterprise. This method creates a more transparent and streamlined enterprise and helps managers, leaders, and teams visualize their work, progress, and financial impact. Moreover, it enables a high degree of trust and autonomy. These two features make employees happier and more engaged and benefit the business in numerous ways.
Agile scaling is most effective when the organization achieves organization-wide synchronicity. This is possible by creating empowered teams, mapping dependencies, and coordinating work across teams. Quarterly Planning can also achieve Agile scaling, which connects agile delivery teams to the corporate strategy and helps everyone understand what each team is working on.
Scaling Agile frameworks is complex and time-consuming, and it only becomes necessary when the workload exceeds the capabilities of a team. However, scaling must be done correctly and effectively, or it will significantly disrupt productivity. In addition, selecting the correct framework will depend on the size of the product and the organization’s organizational model.
