What is Agile? Essential Elements to know

What is Agile? Essential Elements to know
What is Agile? Essential Elements to know. Photo: Pixabay

Software development is becoming more intricate and complicated with the advancement of technology. In order to deliver better and high-tech solutions and meet the ever-changing customer demands, developers realized the need to become more Agile.

Organizations that adopt Agile technology do not have problems of coping up with customer demands and technological advancements. Therefore the demand for Agile development professionals has increased, and it has become a popular career path.

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Let’s get a better understanding of Agile.

What is Agile?

In simple words, Agile methodology is a software development practice which involves continuous development and testing throughout the application development lifecycle.

The development and testing processes take place simultaneously in the development lifecycle which allows errors to be eliminated as and when they occur. This reduces the time consumed in finding the faults and their source during the testing phase at the end of the lifecycle.

Agile development is focused on these four values:

  • Continuous interactions between team and individuals to discuss processes and tools
  • Comprehensive documentation using professional software
  • Customer collaborations with clients over contract negotiation
  • Responding to any changes made to the plan

Agile Methodology

There are many Agile methodologies available today:

  • Scrum
  • Kanban
  • Lean
  • Extreme Programming (XP)
  • Feature Driven Development (FDD)
  • Dynamic Software Development Method (DSDM)

What is Agile Scrum?

Agile Scrum is a project management methodology which has gained huge popularity in the business world today. This methodology particularly focuses on managing tasks within a team-based environment.

The word ‘scrum’ is taken from popular sports rugby. In rugby, each player has a defined role and can play offensive or defensive according to the situation.

Similarly, in Agile Scrum, the development teams are small and have well-defined roles and responsibilities for each developer. The three roles in Agile scrum development teams are:

  • Scrum Master

The Scrum Master is responsible for setting up the team, organizing sprint meetings and eliminating obstacles faced by the scrum development team that affect their progress.

  • Product Owner

The Product Owner is responsible for creating the product backlog, prioritizing it and delivering the functionality at each iteration.

  • Scrum development team

The development team consists of programmers and testers who manage their own work.

All the three work together in a time-boxed duration called sprints. First, the scrum master sets up the scrum team. Then the Product owner creates a product backlog and prioritizes it which acts like a to-do list for the scrum team. Lastly, the scrum team finishes these tasks within a sprint.

The 4 Essential Elements of Agile Development

The organizations who adopt agile development practice are more productive and earn more profit than organizations that do not have an Agile mindset. The key to this success lies with these 4 elements on which Agile development is based.

  1. Delighting customers

Happy customers are the key to every business’s success. As technology is advancing, the customer demands are also increasing and becoming more complicated. It has become essential to exceed customer expectations and keep them happy to succeed in this world.

Agile development allows a business to shift from a business-centric mindset to a customer-centric mindset. This allows organizations to develop strategies that benefit customers and makes them happy.
If your customers are happy, your business will strive.

  1. Descaling work

When different tasks are performed by different teams it becomes harder to integrate them and avoid errors and failures along the way. It is also time-consuming and causes a lot of ambiguities.

In agile development, small teams consisting of people having specific roles and responsibilities work together to get tasks done in a sprint. Thus, a project can be easily disaggregated into small portions and worked on by small teams working iteratively in short cycles.

This allows for easier communication and faster feedback from customers.

  1. Enterprise-wide Agility

Agile is not only for IT development, but it is also a mindset made for the entire organization. Organizations that follow Agile thinking have more effective strategic decision making, process execution, and workflow management.

  1. Nurturing culture

Agile is a continuous practice and commitment to actively nurture and strengthen the entrepreneurial behavior of the entire organization.
The agile culture aims to strengthen all the processes, from communication to leadership, strategy and values, training and personnel management.

Conclusion

Agile development mindset is being widely adopted by organizations in every sector around the world. Its popularity owes to its values and culture which allows organizations to gain an edge over their competitors in the market.

As technology is rapidly advancing, it has become important to be able to adapt to the changes that come with these advancements. Agile development allows companies to cope up with such changes smoothly and efficiently.

This is why organizations need Agile professionals, and it has become a popular career path. If you want to build a successful career in this field, you should take the Agile course and become an Agile expert!