What is Agile Methodology?
What is Agile Methodology?
Agile Methodology can be defined as the technique that helps encourage the continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the life cycle of software development of the project. Unlike the Waterfall model, both testing activities and development are concurrent.
As a whole, the methodology begins with clients showcasing how the end product will be used and what kind of problem will be solved. This would ultimately help to clear the customer’s expectations to the project team. After the work gets started, the team cycle will go through the process of planning, executing, and evaluating. They even change the final deliverable according to the needs of the respective customer. There is no arguing with the fact that continuous collaboration plays an important, both with project stakeholders and team members to make fully-informed decisions.
What are the Benefits of Agile Methodology?
Following are the possible benefits of Agile Methodology.
With the help of Agile, teams become more efficient at getting their work done. As agile teams work in a shared culture, efficiencies would be generated without any difficulty. When everyone is well aware of the task that has been assigned, each person can focus on the most vital task and the entire team works collectively. This would ultimately make the work easier and at the same time, helps in the predictability of agile projects.
Keep this in mind that the incremental nature of the agile method means that projects are completed in a shorter period of time, making them easy to manage. With this, changes can be done quite easily and allow products to be rolled out quickly at any point during the process.
Because it is iterative, it holds the ability to find problems and create effective solutions for the problems. The agile method is flexible in nature that allows the concerned project teams to sort out the queries of the customer which will certainly improve the product quality significantly.
Focus on Business Value:
One of the biggest benefits of Agile is an increased focus on delivering strategic business value. This is usually done by involving business stakeholders in the process of development. Once the operation gets started, the team understands what’s most important and can deliver the required features, providing the most business value to their organization.
Another important benefit of agile development is that it allows for change. While the team focuses on delivering the subset of the product’s features during each process of iteration, it provides a room for an opportunity to refine and reprioritize the backlog of the overall product.
What are the Major Drawbacks of Agile Methodology?
Like other methodology, agile is not made for all kinds of project, and as a result, it is wise to find out the best methodology for each unique situation. As a matter of fact, agile may not work as intended either a customer is not specific about his goals, the project manager or team doesn’t have enough experience or they do not perform well especially under significant pressure.
Throughout the whole process of development, agile usually works best for the project teams, developers, and customer goals. Due to its flexible processes, agile cannot be molded within larger more traditional organizations where there is a lot of flexibility within processes, policies, or teams. There are chances that the problem might arise when being used with customers who similarly have rigid processes or different operating methods.
What are the Popular Agile Methodologies?
Listed below are some of the prominent agile methods:
- Dynamic System Development Model
- Lean (LN)
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Crystal Clear methods
- Adaptive software development (ASD)
- Agile Unified Process (AUP)
- RAD(Rapid Application Development)
- Disciplined agile delivery
- Feature-driven development (FDD)