Going agile? Here are 5 benefits you can expect

Agile development is continuously and increasingly enjoying acceptance, even giving rise to exclusive resources and software to adopt the philosophy for specific industries. However, apprehensions about embracing it and insufficient knowledge continue to feed each causing resistance to the effective adoption of agile development.

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In this article let’s see what’s agile and why we think you should consider it.

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What’s Agile?

Agile software development is commonly presented by gurus as a philosophy rather than a methodology. This is understandable, given that being agile has little to do with any hard and fast rules, but is a collective mindset to be adopted by teams to cross-function and self-organise.

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It helps development become robust through continuous and adaptive planning, delivery, and improvement. This accommodates changes in requirements or any new development in the project.

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The following are the key Agile software development values as seen on the

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Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

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Why agile?

Action from day one

Agile helps you dive head first into the project from day one. This is by breaking the project/requirement down into problems, prioritizing, and working on them already. This way the top requirement sees focused and immediate engagement. Since agile aims at continuous delivery of small increments, the project sees work towards delivery from the go.

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This helps all teams to stay on a fast track and keeps all stakeholders, including the client, involved and motivated throughout the project.

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Increase positive client engagement

Clients or customers are a part of the team and have greater involvement than in traditional development. The developers collaborate with them to define the in-depth requirements including like User Stories and keep them involved throughout the project.

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The customer takes estimates at each step from the developer and briefs about each requirement as required. They take collective decisions on the structure of development depending on the value to the end user. This also means continuous feedback and questions from both parties or at least at the end of each iteration.

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Realistic expectations

One of the most obvious and practical advantages is that the client/customer remains open throughout the development. Regular small deliveries instead of a huge wait for the delivery of a final large package enables agile development teams to set realistic expectations.

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Embrace Change

Traditional development methodologies require set-in-stone documentation and schedules planned for software development. It leaves little room for accommodating any change. Ironically it is common knowledge that more often than not, this approach ends up with little to no adherence to said schedule.

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Such a rigid approach makes the process less robust, especially when there is a demand for change. And don’t we all know how inevitable change is?

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Implementing agile development helps you respond to changes, be it in the target market or new requirements from your client. The progressive development, regular delivery of small increments, and gathering of feedback allow agile to embrace change easily.

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Collective Product Ownership

Agile teams foster and nurture a shared idea and ideal of what they develop. They work in harmony to bring the idea to life in the best-known way. Both the idea and their contribution sees incremental value additions. This inspires the yardstick for quality and usability to also continuously improves.

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At Emproto Technologies we have an agile culture and have developed digital products for 50+ products in the internet, healthcare, consumer, enterprise, and e-commerce across the globe. Our clients include Asian Paints, Philips Lighting, Titan, Innoviti, Savaari, Grexter, and Phablecare among others.