How Agile made the impact?
Agile, the most poorly comprehended word in the world of IT. So what is Agile? Agile is simple, it’s a set of 4 values which is called Agile Manifesto and 12 principles derived from those values (https://agilemanifesto.org). On the other hand Agile is a group of software development methods which are based on the Agile Manifesto, in which requirements and solutions evolve though collaboration between self-organizing, cross functional teams. Some of the Agile software development method are Adaptive Software Development (ASD), Agile Modelling, Agile Unified Process (AUP), Crystal Clear Methods (Crystal Clear), Disciplined Agile Delivery, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Extreme Programming (XP), Feature Driven Development (FDD), Lean software development, Kanban, Scrum and Scrum-ban.
So what’s the impact of this buzz word in the industry? According to the 2011 CHAOS report from the Standish Group, Agile projects are three times more successful than traditional projects. So what you mean by success? Success means different thing to different people, in Information Technology (IT) success is the combination of Return on Investment (ROI), Stakeholder value, Product quality and Time/Schedule.
How Agile made the impact?
As per the recent surveys agile have an average of 200% better Return on Investment (ROI), the performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or business value. ROI is measured as the increasing volume and revenue while maintaining current costs or reducing costs while maintaining current volume and revenue. Agile achieves it by insisting the product development across iterations. Get the product out to market early with limited features, continue adding features and then launch the fully functional version. Which also make the agile is the perfect methodology to gain the ‘first mover’ advantage.
Agile helps in creating an increased stakeholder value through stakeholder collaboration, responding to stakeholders changing priority as the changing priorities are so valuable in creating great products and demonstrating working functionality to the stakeholder after each iteration. With all the above, the stakeholders has a better visibility even when the product is shaping up, which helps to have an increased transparency and ownership.
Product quality and an emphasis on quality is a must have ingredients for any project to be successful. Agile has an excellent practices to make sure that the quality is as high as possible. In agile, testing is frequent and it starts early in the project, so most of the bugs are caught early in the project. Test driven development (TDD), Pair programing and continuous integration ensures a high quality product with minimum bugs. Along with other practices the sprint retrospective will allow the team to reflect on themselves and improve.
Time/Schedule; by using time-boxed, fixed schedule iterations, the features can be delivered frequently with a high level of predictability. This provide the visibility to the amount of work that can be completed by the team in the fixed-schedule time box. To a large extent agile is about making tradeoffs, the understanding of the amount of work can be completed will help the product-owner/stakeholder to trade scope for schedule; get more lately or less soon.
It may not be proper to compare the traditional methods which are optimized for productivity and quality to agile methods which are optimized for customer satisfaction, project success and risk reduction. But agile is a powerful tool for software development, not only providing benefits to the customer or to the project success but also to an increased team morale and team collaboration.