What is Agile Methodology?

It’s been more than 20 years since Agile methodology for software development was introduced. It is a method in which the project is broken down into several phases and developed in the multiple iterations. It involves continuous collaboration of team members, stockholders and constant improvement at every phase. In Agile, project can adopt required changes at every stage of it’s development. Agile has become one of the most popular methods of project management due to it’s flexibility and high capacity of adopting the required changes.

Benefits of Agile Methodology

Using Agile provides many advantages over the traditional Waterfall model of software development. In the waterfall model, every stage is separate from each other, and the end user has to wait until the last phase to request the changes and provide the feedback. In Software development it is often seen that the requirements are not clear at the very beginning of the SDLC.

Being a sequential model, waterfall is not suitable for a big sized projects where changes keep coming. Agile project management results in far less re-work on projects as issues and changes are identified in the early stages itself. Since, Waterfall doesn’t have an iterative approach; there is a high possibility of re-work after delivery or completion of a major feature or milestone.

One of the thumb rule of IT products is that first to market has an advantage in being successful. Agile approach lets speed up the development process and product can be delivered in incremental phases. It also provides end user insights in earlier phases giving product owners right direction to take product further. 

            In the Agile development, testing is done at the sprint level to ensure that the project is delivered in an optimum state. It promotes collaboration and interaction within the team, which improves the understanding of requirements and overall development process. Customer satisfaction is of highest priority for any business, agile project management is highly recommended.

Outcomes of adopting Agile Methodology

Agile is not only a project management approach by is serves as a tool achieve quality products on time but also develop business mindset as whole.

  • Focusing on priorities

Agile strategy ensures right features as picked at right time for development. As stated earlier early insights helps correcting direction of product from time to time.

  • Quality of work

As testing runs parallel with development with each sprint overall product quality increase during deliveries. This also helps development team to update things at early stage decreasing overall rework efforts.

  • Performance Measurement

Agile methodology gives quantitative approach to measure performance of resources individually as well as of team as whole. With each sprint review, misestimating, overflow, issue counts etc. helps measure performance. These parameters help to understand improvement areas.

  • Resource Upskilling

Having clear tasks in backlog gives chance of upskilling resources their technical skills. R&D tasks can be created for complex functionalities which need out of box solutions. This also keep team excited about work and its does not remain about just completing assigned tasks anymore.

  • Risk Management

Performance parameters and quick status of development provides visibility of project. This not only shows the predicted future roadmap of development but also show pitfalls/risk at early stage.

Doing and Being Agile

Just adopting agile methods and processes doesn’t ensure success of project. Being agile means team needs to adopt and accept agile mindset. To be agile rather than just doing agile organization should break waterfall red tapes like not starting development before entire sign-off, not accepting changes to previous specifications as demanded, not engaging clients until product is complete and ready for deployment.

In conclusion, Agile methodology is a mindset of developing quick and quality products. Pushing this methodology transformation through organization helps improve productivity, team bonding, job satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

– Tushar Patil