How to make the most out of Agile Development Methodology?

There are no shortcuts to innovation. Enterprises seeking to innovate adopt the agile practice to achieve higher success rate. There are several enterprises that are already aware of the several benefits that agile development methodology can offer. For example, transparency, enhanced communication, collaboration with stakeholders, improved efficiency, team stability and enhanced ease of adaptability to changes. In one of our recent blogs, there was a comparison between agile development approach and waterfall development approach. There are several enterprises that opt for agile as it provides faster and high-quality output.

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Agile Development Approach is a combination of mindset, tools and methodology. It gives you the ability to experiment with new ideas and deliver enhanced value to your end-customers. There are an increasing number of enterprises who are adopting agile development methodology to become competitive. ISHIR has helped several clients to deliver faster time to market when launching a new product and creating a high customer value.

How to make Agile Development successful?

• The success of the agile practice starts from the top management who help to create an ecosystem where agile can be openly adopted. Agile must be made a top priority, and leadership must work towards creating an ‘agile mindset’.
• One of the main responsibilities of leadership is to build cross-functional collaboration. It comes with cultural change, trust and partnership between all team members.
• Appoint a product owner who can define a proper business hypothesis, ability to collect right data and choose best hypothesis
• Business, technology and engineering teams must work closely and together to achieve common objectives
• Team of business and technology managers can together promote the concepts of agile development
• Since Agile adoption is an enterprise wide transformation, representatives from Finance, Strategy, HR, Marketing, HR and other departments.
• The baseline of Agile Development Approach is iteration. Iteration helps a product to evolve, the small changes lead to big change. Every feature and upgrade can’t be built in a single iteration or sprint. It can evolve as feedback from different stakeholders is incorporated.
• Agile is successful if the work items are not broken down into manageable tasks.
• Agile retrospective needs action items and points from one sprint to be carried onto the next sprint
• One of the reasons for the popularity of Agile Development Methodology, the focus on business outcome and each team members’ feedback. People are empowered, during an agile development methodology, to solve challenges and problems.
• Agile encourages a culture where people come together to solve problems. There is a shared responsibility and shared accountability. Developers, analysts and testers work together to build an increment that contributes to build a product.
• The team needs to deliver value, and that will happen if work products are synchronized. For agile to delivery substantial business results, agile development methodology needs to be adopted in all aspects of product development lifecycle.
• Focus on technical excellence helps to write code that is free of errors and can be reliable and scalable over a period.
• Agile team must work towards quantifying, managing and eliminating project risks.
• The purpose of agile development approach is to build the right product and it is essential to get early feedback from relevant stakeholders.
• Agile development approach reinforces openness and transparency to learn and grow from lessons learned.
• Agile approach fosters a culture of trust and dependability. There should be interpersonal trust between all team members and inter team members.
• The roles of Scrum master and Product Owner must be reinforced and there must be different people to play these roles.

If you wish to learn more about agile development approach, you can speak to one of our experts who are pros in Agile Development Approach.