Agile development is an approach of developing software in an iterative manner. It gives businesses an ability to be proactive to towards the changes and tap the benefits of the changing market environment. In agile development, once the applications are built, they are integrated and altered on a continuous basis to meet the demands of rapidly changing and unpredictable market. Hence, applying agility in the development environment aligns the development cycle with today’s volatile market. Moreover, it also ensures that the developers are updated with the latest technologies on a regular basis and the entire project is properly organized.
From a business perspective, agile development has many advantages. It allows people to be productive, respond quickly to requirements and transfer idea more rapidly. It reduces the risk of failures as the team collectively takes part in the development process and are aware about each and every step occurring in the development cycle. Besides these, there are several reasons why business should adopt agile software development process. Below mentioned are just to name a few.
- Find Problems Quickly – As your team members meet on a regular basis and discuss the work progress, you can ask them “are you facing any issues?” When one person among the team says “yes”, the rest of the team members realize that there is a problem and give suggestions to find a solution to it.
- Quick ROI – Being agile means, the team is struggling to complete the development quickly without compromising on the quality since there is a continuous integration and iteration in the development. This reduces the idle time and helps in reaching the final results quickly giving quick ROI.
- Risk Reduction – Since agile development is about responding to requirements quickly and on a continuous basis, it reduces the risks of wrong product development. The teams from the beginning of the project focus on the architecture and release the sprints which are actually built in the right manner. This again reduces the risks of defects.
- Better Estimation – As the developers and testers are actively involved in the whole development cycle, they are aware of the real scenarios and requirements. They can quickly sum up and calculate the time to complete the entire project along with accurate estimation of cost and resources.
- Fosters Communication – Agility in the team brings the members closer. It helps them work with each other in real time and solve issues together. This helps in enhancing the communication which is meagre in traditional waterfall development method as the process is done more via documentation.
- Prepare for Testing – In the traditional method, the QA team works blindly because they don’t know the issues developers face in the early stages. On the contrary, when you fix an “all teams” meetings every week, the QA team realizes what type of problems they are likely to face during the testing phase. This helps in preparing for testing in advance.
- Customer Satisfaction – Who likes to invest in a product that doesn’t work or doesn’t meet the expectations? The advantages of being agile is that it allows developers to make changes in the applications frequently based on their feedback and requirements. This can create several happy and satisfied customers.
- Evolving Outcomes – In agile development, you have to build as you go. It is about developing a little, learning something new, adding new features, changing again as per client requests, building a little more. Continuous evolution helps in developing unique software that is quite better than what you have planned rigidly.
- Better Understanding of the Process – As you go with the development and as the project progresses, you can understand the whole project and determine the best course of actions. If you keep the same team for future projects, you already know the process that works the best and thus can save a lot of time.
- Keeps Informed – With agile development, you can quickly gauge where things are working fine, what things are broken, and which features could be improved since the whole process is transparent and all team players are equally aware of the facts.
- Helps Avoid Future Problems – As team members talk about the good, bad and ugly things regularly, they realize the shortcomings and determine a solution so that the same problem does not crop up in future.
After reading the aforementioned reasons, you must have realized why reputed software development companies are adapting the agile development process. It may seem a bit complicated during the first few months but once you get accustomed, you will start realizing its effectiveness.
Author Bio: Prashant Chambakara is a test automation technology enthusiast, loves to share insights, views and information on software testing and its associated branches like automation testing, test automation tools, etc. He is currently working with Cygnet Infotech – a leading software testing service provider and the parent company of TestingWhiz, a web browser automation tool. Feel free to contact us. Connect with Prashant on Twitter @PChambakara.