Journey from Traditional model towards Agile

The word agile is well know across the industry. Agile methodology has picked in market from late 2008 in a rigorous way. Many organizations/projects are being transitioned to agile till date. This article is trying to clearly describe the difference between the waterfall and agile methodology so that an individual/team or organization can weigh the difference and select a suitable methodology which help them in getting better ROI and there by would do wonders for them.

Waterfall model:

Most of us have worked on the waterfall model from the beginning of our carrier. The times have changed and there is lot of demand for quick delivery of products. Few of the aspects of waterfall model which could be hindrance to quick/reliable/ quality delivery would be:

1. More waiting time for requirements to freeze.
2. We would have defined a Test strategy at the beginning of the project. But most of the time the document is not looked into when the actual testing starts. Ex: Lets say we need to test an application across different browsers(the cross-browser testing). We might miss few of the browsers as they are not well known and thus there could be potential risk involved during the release of the product.
3. Testing team involvement would be very late. Thus the team would not get the complete understanding of the project and there by few of the end to end flows could be untested.

Advantages of Agile methodology:

1. The requirements are crisp, clear and are defined at the basic level. This helps the engineering team to have a through understanding and there by the standard of development and testing would be high.
2. As the products are delivered as part of sprints, there is a fast delivery to market and thus ROI could be seen as early as possible.
3. During each Sprint retrospective meetings(which are conducted during the end of each sprint), we get continuous feedback which would help in remodeling the project as per the requirements of the market and the clients.
4. In an agile project, the QA team owns the requirement. Thus they have a complete understanding of the requirements. This would enable the team with proper authority to accept/reject a feature/build so that the quality is of utmost priority.
5. The normal size suggested for an agile team is 7 plus or minus 2. This is to maintain open communication and building a trust across the team. Selecting a ideal team members plays a major role in building a healthy and united team. The team should be cross-functional so that 1.   each one can step into other shoes and fill in the gaps so that there is no delay or no featured is skipped in the sprint which was committed during the sprint planning.
6. A new strategy called Feature- branching can be put into place. This helps each team owning a new environment for their sprint team. This would provide more space and through testing can be conducted by the respective teams. The main advantage of having feature branch is that the merged codes would not have any conflict and thus more sustainable and robust build would be available for integration testing at higher level

What is Agile all about-

There are many questions which would arise when the term Agile comes into picture.

• How about documentation
• Are we adhering to quality standards
• What are the different stages followed
• How about the Architecture
• What framework of Agile would best suit our project

Let us discuss each topic in detail:

• How about documentation

Documentation in agile should be sufficient enough to cover the subject but to make sure that the audience and the participants have more interest towards it. This can be achieved by eliminating the unnecessary, lengthy documentation which are part of Waterfall model. There should be sufficient documentation for the team to refer, track the day to day activities so that all the team members are on same page.

• Are we adhering to quality standards

Quality is one of the key aspects which would determine the durability and sustainability of the application. One of the key areas which is given importance in an agile project is for Quality.

The above diagram which explains the principles of agile clearly mentions that in any project Quality is at the center and there is no deviation against it.

• What are the different stages followed

Agile methodology propagates that we can follow the different stages of SDLC within a single Sprint. Each sprint consists of the activities like Planning, Design, Development and testing. It would also involve the deployment phase where in the individual team code is merged and a complete build is created.

• How about the Architecture

Stepping stone for any project will be a product vision and Product strategy. Product strategy would involve different stake holders who would give their valuable inputs in build a stable architecture which would drive the complete project.

• What framework of Agile would best suit our project

There are 9 different Framework of Agile methodology are as below:

• Scrum
• Dynami System Delivery Model (DSDM)
• Adaptive Syatems Management (ASD)
• eXtreme Programming (XP)
• Crystal
• Feature Driven Development(FDD)
• Lean Kanban

Currently the combination of Scrum and Kanban called Scrumban is in more demand in the market.