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Six Reasons Why Agile Is Better For Your Business.

Agile projects are feedback-driven.

Agile incorporates external feedback into the product throughout the development process. This is made possible largely by a key concept in the Agile world: the iteration. Rather than writing the entire body of software at once, the team breaks the functionality up into small chunks and implements a few items at a time over the course of a short period (usually 2 – 4 weeks). At the end of every iteration, the system is demonstrated to stakeholders. This gives them a chance to see the progress being made, give suggestions on the direction, and allows the team to correct any misunderstandings or incorporate any important changes that have come up. The concept of the iteration may be Agile’s greatest contribution to the world of software development. If you do nothing else, your team should seriously consider developing in an iterative manner. The benefits are significant.

Agile projects improve communication and collaboration.

Agile methods favor real-time verbal communication over documentation. The fact is that humans communicate much more effectively when words are spoken rather than written. Not only are detailed requirement documents time consuming and tedious to generate, they ironically tend to create confusion and misunderstandings. This is because documents are one-sided conversations and lack the back and forth dialog between users, management, and developers that is needed to truly define something as complex as software. Instead of trying to enumerate and convey every single use case, edge condition, and error state in a written document, it’s far more efficient and effective to sit down in a room with your team and hash these out together. Often times this process will identify unconsidered scenarios, eliminate unimportant concepts, and put the team on the same page about exactly how the software works.

Agile projects are transparent.

Under Agile, visibility into the work being done is given special attention. Teams are encouraged to publish progress information such as automated build server logs for stakeholders to see. Users and managers are encouraged to attend demos and other meetings. Developers often make builds regularly available for testing and use by stakeholders. This visibility enables the team to keep the project on track. Management no longer has to turn the project over to the development team and hope they get what they want six months later. They can see everything that’s going on in the project on a daily basis.

Agile projects produce working software.

The fundamental point of each iteration is to generate working software. The idea is to focus on user-facing features that add tangible value to the product, which keeps the team focused on the ultimate goal: releasing a product. Over time iterations progressively layer on features, which enable stakeholders to see the product take shape over time. This gradual evolution of the product not only allows the team to more quickly identify problems and course-correct, but it also improves morale and creates positive momentum that carry projects forward.

Agile produces realistic schedules.

Since Agile methods break work into small iterations, your team will begin to develop predictability. After a while it will start to become apparent how much work can be accomplished in one iteration, and this can be used to make predictions about the overall schedule of the project. In the Scrum world for example, the average number of story points that your team finishes in a sprint can be used to extrapolate how much time is needed to finish all the work left in the product backlog.

Agile projects save time and money.

The continuous feedback and incremental implementation help resolve any potential issues early and quickly, which means there is much less risk of having to discard months of work and start over. Software is a moving target, especially for startup projects. It’s crucial that your project can embrace change rather than breakdown in the face of it.