Continuous Improvement for Agile software development.

In this post I would like to share my insights regarding a pragmatic way of improving your Agile software development. 

It will help you accelerate delivery, improve quality, and reduce costs of your software development efforts. 

Let us start by reviewing the following diagram that demonstrates a common development cycle which is based on Agile practices (diagram 1): 

You probably use a similar process and yet, you would like to accelerate delivery, improve quality and reduce costs … .

Therefore, the question that you should regularly ask would be: “What can be improved?” (diagram 2):

Below are a few recommended practices that can be added to your Agile development cycle: (diagram 3):

• Continuous Improvement process
• Kanban
• KPIs
• Story Mapping
• Forecasting

Modeling the complete process is described below: (diagram 4):

Takeaways:

My recommendations as to how to improve all important measures (speed, quality, costs …) are :

1.      Model your current Agile development process (diagram 1).

2.      Reflect on what can be improved in your current process (diagram 2) .

3.      Identify practices that can significantly improve your process. In our case: Continuous Improvement, Kanban, KPIs, Story Mapping and Forecasting (diagram 3)

4.      Incrementally implement the selected practices and update the modeling of the new process (diagram 4)  

5.      Apply a continuous improvement process by regularly Iterate step 1-4.

And remember :