What is Agile Development Methodology and why to prefer it?

Agile Development Methodology is the traditional approach of the software development life cycle (SDLC), which helps the team to respond though sprints. Agile development model is also called incremental model, where projects are incremented in rapid cycles after previous builds are released. Requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. Software testing is done at every stage of development to make sure that there is no compromise in the quality. It is about how to work together to achieve a common goal.

Agile Development Methodology is one kind of disciplined project management system that needs a frequent inspection for the rapid quality and high inspection of software. Agile methodology is one kind of agile manifesto that was developed by a group of fourteen leading figures of the software industry, which talks about their experience and what approaches works and dismay for the software development process. 

It mainly emphasizes on four different core values:

1. Communication between team regarding the process and tools
2. Detailed documentation on current software
3. Negotiation of contracts by customer collaboration
4. Responding to changes over following a plan

Ever since then, the use of methods that support these values has become increasingly popular. 12 principles are generally followed behind agile development:

1. Customer is the king and hence his satisfaction is the most important through continuous delivery of the software
2. Requirements changes as the time mature and agile welcomes it to harness the change of customer’s competitive requirements
3. Due to iterative changes, software must be delivered at a regular interval of time
4. Team leaders and team should work cohesively throughout the project
5. Support their needs in the project and make them believe to get the work done faster
6. Face-to-face conversation is very much necessary for conveying the information effectively
7. Working software is the primary measure of the progress
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely
9. Continuous attention should be paid to the good design to enhance the quality of the project
10. As long as the project is simple, it will maximize the productivity and amount of the work done
11. Team importance is much essential to develop the best architecture design and requirements
12. As the project grows, team shows how efficiently they are working and adjusting to the behavior accordingly

Why Agile?

There are many reasons to choose agile methodologies. It provides great opportunities to assess the direction of a project through SDLC. Hence the progress of agile development can be achieved by regular monitoring of work known as sprints, and the project should be ready in a delivery mode before the deadline. By focusing on repetitive work cycles, agile methods are described as iterative and incremental. At every sprint of development, requirement, design, research, code is continually tested throughout the cycle. When the evaluation is stopped, the team thinks about the project in another direction. Inspect and adapt strategy reduces development cost and saves much time. When team gathers the requirements, at the same time they develop software and this phenomenon is known as “analysis paralysis” cycle which doesn’t hinder the team much in making the progress. The team works for 2 weeks and hence this give the opportunities to stakeholder to calibrate the release in the real world. This methodology encourages the team to build the right product and of course quickly. Instead of committing to market, a piece of software that hasn’t even been written yet, agile empowers teams to continuously replan their release to optimize its value throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace.

Agile Metrics

Metrics collected for effective agile is:

• Hourly efforts do not contribute to the sprint goals
• Drag factor can be improved by shared resources, and by reducing the amount of noncontributing work
• No of units tested
• Number of failures converted into delivered functionality
• Rates can be increased by % of drag factor – new rates = old rates + drag factor
• Time taken to complete the releases
• Errors in the increments or previous iterations
• Production defect leakage

Advantages

• There is a less use of documentation in agile technologies and hence, it saves a lot of time and money
• Changes can be implemented at any stage of the development without considering the budget constraints
• Due to daily discussions and meetings, issues can be identified in advance and therefore one can work accordingly
• Testing is done after every sprint, hence it enables the quick development