‘Deliver Quality at
Speed’ is the success mantra in the current highly-competitive digital business
world. The traditional approaches for software development divide development
and testing into two different steps – developers build a feature and then QA team
tests it for defects. As the product grows, the testing time and efforts also
grow exponentially.
Agile software development approach offers significant benefits
to the business – accelerated time to market, better competitive
differentiation, high-quality software that enriches customer
satisfaction. The 10th annual State of Agile™ survey makes it clear that agile software development has grown
increasingly popular over the last decade.
This blog post gives a
quick snapshot of the top 10 reasons stated in the 10th annual State of Agile™
survey for embracing agile software delivery:
1. Accelerate product delivery – The agile development approach enables the enterprise to deliver high-quality software within faster release cycles that is more in line with the user needs. Agile development approach involving shorter sprints is gaining momentum to keep up the speed of development process in consistent with the business goals.
2. Enhance ability to manage changing priorities – Agile approach for software development requires not only teams to develop and test faster, but also to deliver enhancements to the products and services faster to the customers. Ensuring that changes / enhancements required by customers in a reliable and usable manner requires taking an agile approach through every step of the project.
3. Increase productivity – Organizations need to be on a constant lookout to achieve better business outcomes. The agile approach enables increased productivity through more effective communication while being highly responsive to ever-changing customer demands.
4. Enhance software quality – In an agile environment, the development and QA teams cooperate with each other very well, also aim to develop software rapidly in close collaboration with the customer. Agile techniques evaluate and enhance the software quality while offering increased customer value.
5. Enhance delivery predictability – Clients usually care about predictability. Without reliable and predictable teams, stable predictable programs, particularly when there are multiple dependencies between the teams, are not possible. With an agile approach for software delivery which emphasizes on setting up metrics and measurement, teams can plan, coordinate, and deliver with enough predictability along with a release level commitment.
6. Improve business/IT alignment – Organizations need to improve the business and IT alignment to achieve high business value. The fast changing business environment calls for innovation and agility. An organization has to move towards business/IT alignment by focusing on a process to be improved while considering the infrastructure and technology. An agile approach enables all the IT operational processes – Change-Problem-Incidents-IT operations – to be well aligned.
7. Improve project visibility – Visibility is the key to adapt quickly to the needed change. Various development, testing, and operations teams must be aware of the current state, the performance, and the objective of the project and organization. Improving the team and leadership visibility through agile approach provides customer value early and often.
8. Reduce project risk – Agile as an effective approach for software development inherently reduces risk in software development. Software development in sprints includes agile techniques such as sprint review, the sprint retrospective, etc. Such techniques provide constant feedback which helps prevent deviations between expectations and the completed software.
9. Improve team morale – Agile approach for software development emphasizes on better communication and collaboration among various teams. Self-organization, seamless communication, treating each member with respect, high collaboration, project visibility to all the stakeholders, etc. which are intrinsic characteristics of agile approach bring positive change and keep the teams motivated. Agile approach demands an organization to listen to its employees, communicate its plans to deal with various concerns with employees and recognize employees for their efforts and accomplishments.
10. Improve engineering discipline – The vital component of the high-quality product is always a good and scalable design and architecture. When an organization goes for adopting the agile principles with a goal of delivering a high-quality product, they also should embrace sound engineering discipline. A good design, perfect configuration management, and effective testing strategies are crucial to making the best use of agility.
We, at Cigniti, employ agile practices for software testing to
empower our clients with better business outcomes. We are going to organize a
joint webinar with Smartbear on
July 20th, 2016 on “Developing a Robust Testing Approach for Agile
Transformation.” As part of this webinar, we will primarily focus on the key
drivers for moving to an agile process. Do join us for the webinar and learn
how organizations can keep pace with emerging agile trends.
