Why Agile Development?

agile |ˈajəl|

adjectiveable to move quickly and easily : Ruth was as agile as a monkey | figurative his vague manner concealed an agile mind.ORIGIN late Middle English : via French from Latin agilis, from agere‘do.’

Why is it important to software development practices?

Improved success rate for any projects.

In the beginning, most software were developed based on a waterfall approach. The name waterfall was used because the look of a project plan (gantt chart) that resembles a waterfall pattern.

System Analysts will do fact finding (requirements definition) and prepare a thick documentation that may not be easily understood by non-technical people. Once its done, it will take, say 6 months to a year or more to develop.

Once completed, it will then present the software to the users or clients (stakeholders). The chances of the project fails due to various reasons are much higher. Most probably they already forgotten what was the project details.

As for Agile development, results can be seen much quicker. For example, the development team can update latest working software on a weekly basis for the management team to review and users to test, with feedbacks on what to add or change.

Based on the to do list, development team can set the time required for each tasks and a progressive roadmap is formed. Everyone can follow the progress of the roadmap based on daily updates.

This encourages collaboration between development and the stakeholders. However, stakeholders need to commit time to involve in the project and its not optional.

How we incorporate Agile mindset in everything we do?

Writing or documentation in an agile way. No one can write a complete book in one go. It is always by iterations, writing down thoughts and rewriting it.

When writing is done in a group rather than individual, agile is more apparent as everyone in the team can see changes almost immediately and improving it (rewriting). A good example is Wikipedia – an online collaborative documentation from contributors effort.

Everyone in the team is involved and informed.

You may want to incorporate a Wiki software within your organization for multi-purpose journals and documentation. Everyone in your team can participate to write parts of the document such as Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).

The bottom line…

The concept of Agile is not new but an improved way of ensuring higher success rate for projects by improving collaboration and communication between development and stakeholders.