Why agile software development

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 client. Agile helps project teams deal with many of the most common project pitfalls such as cost, schedule predictability and scope creep in a more controlled manner.

By reorganizing and re-envisioning the activities involved in custom software development , Agile achieves those same objectives in a leaner and more business-focused way. Skip to content. Written by Segue Technologies on August 25, The spread of the ideas at this time was very organic, and all of those different approaches started to grow in a very grassroots manner.

People borrowed the original frameworks and tweaked them with different practices to make them appropriate for their own contexts. When they got together, they did some skiing and also discussed where their approaches to software development had commonalities and differences. The two main things the Agile Manifesto did was to provide a set of value statements that form the foundation for Agile software development and to coin the term Agile software development itself.

In the months afterward, the authors expanded on the ideas of the Agile Manifesto with the 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto. People could go online and sign it to show their support. Agile Alliance was officially formed in late as a place for people who are developing software and helping others develop software to explore and share ideas and experiences.

Teams and organizations started to adopt Agile, led primarily by people doing the development work in the teams. Gradually, managers of those teams also started introducing Agile approaches in their organizations.

As Agile became more widely known, an ecosystem formed that included the people who were doing Agile software development and the people and organizations who helped them through consulting, training, frameworks, and tools.

As the ecosystem began to grow and Agile ideas began to spread, some adopters lost sight of the values and principles espoused in the manifesto and corresponding principles. Organizations that focus solely on the practices and the rituals experience difficulties working in an Agile fashion. Instead, it simply becomes the way they approach work.

Agile Alliance continues to curate resources to help you adopt Agile practices and improve your ability to develop software with agility. The Agile Alliance website provides access to those resources including videos and presentations from our conferences , experience reports , an Agile Glossary , a directory of local community groups , and several other resources.

Those values and principles provide guidance on how to create and respond to change and how to deal with uncertainty. When you face uncertainty, try something you think might work, get feedback, and adjust accordingly.

Keep the values and principles in mind when you do this. Let your context guide which frameworks, practices, and techniques you use to collaborate with your team and deliver value to your customers. If Agile is a mindset, then what does that say about the idea of Agile methodologies? To answer this question, you may find it helpful to have a clear definition of methodology. Alistair Cockburn suggested that a methodology is the set of conventions that a team agrees to follow.

So Agile methodologies are the conventions that a team chooses to follow in a way that follows Agile values and principles. The team will always need to adapt its use of a framework to fit properly in its context.

The Agile Manifesto and the 12 Principles were written by a group of software developers and a tester to address issues that software developers faced. When you think of Agile as a mindset, that mindset can be applied to other activities. When you do that, Agile becomes an adjective. It describes how you perform some activity. It does not create a new methodology for the reasons explained above. You might say that business agility is a recognition that in order for people in an organization to operate with an Agile mindset, the entire organization needs to support that mindset.

Agile software development was never truly Agile until the organization changed its structure and operations to work in an uncertain environment. Below are a few key Agile concepts. You can see more in our glossary section. A small minority of team members may be part-time contributors, or may have competing responsibilities.

Incremental Development : Nearly all Agile teams favor an incremental development strategy; in an Agile context, this means that each successive version of the product is usable, and each builds upon the previous version by adding user-visible functionality.

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These numbers reinforce what many of us have experienced personally: the waterfall approach is a risky and expensive way to build software systems. See how Digital. Technical debt refers to the maintenance tasks required to support the existing product. Those tasks include defect resolution, refactoring, and testing.

In a traditional project methodology, this technical debt can accumulate quickly as the team focuses on new feature development to keep pace with the project timeline. Agile software development helps keep technical debt to a minimum.

Any defects, feature changes or other maintenance tasks are added to what is known as a product backlog. The team reviews the backlog during each sprint planning session to determine what to address next. Thus, each sprint is a new opportunity to fix defects along with new feature development. Teams not only adapt to change in Agile, they are encouraged to embrace the practice.

Agile acknowledges that customer needs change and that teams must be able to adapt. Working in time-boxed iterations means the team does not need to wait on a lengthy requirement change, review and approval process.

Any change or maintenance item is added to the backlog and allotted to an upcoming sprint based on priority and business need. An Agile software development process requires a level of collaboration and involvement that one would not find in a traditional waterfall project. In waterfall, each phase often only involves a specific set of individuals with expertise to accomplish the tasks for that phase.

However, Agile is quite different. Before each sprint, the entire team reviews, validates, and agrees on which user stories to assign to the sprint. The developers, analysts, testers, and product owner work together to accomplish the items assigned to the sprint. The team meets daily to keep everyone on the same page.

The traditional approach to software development leaves product testing and release to the end of the project. Using Agile for mobile application testing, teams get feedback almost daily and can act on that feedback immediately. Developing a product in sprints allows teams to quickly determine if they are on track and allows them to adjust almost immediately.

Also, because sprints are customer-focused, the team can be sure they are producing value at every release. Waterfall methodology can negatively impact the quality of the product. In a waterfall methodology, project phases may be so full of features that developers must rush to complete them and little time is left for testing.