Pre – Requisites for any Agile project!

What is Agile?

• Agile management is a continual and incremental method of managing the design and building activities for constructing a new product or service development projects in a highly flexible and interactive manner.
• It is a framework that is used to design, plan, and control iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions emerge through association between self-organizing and cross-functional teams.

Agile management provides opportunities to check the direction of the project throughout the development lifecycle and this is achieved through regular cadences of work, known as Sprints at the end of which teams should present a potentially product increment. Agile methodology has been described as ‘Iterative’ and ‘incremental' because the focus is on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product that they yield, agile. In traditional or any other method, development teams get only one chance to see or correct each aspect of a project. In an agile model, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. — is continuously revisited. The team re-evaluates the direction of a project every two weeks by working on the changes required. Also there’s time to steer the project in another direction.

By adapting this approach of development greatly reduces the development costs and time as it helps the team to develop the software at the time of requirement gathering as team’s work cycle is limited to few weeks, also the business users get numerous chances to align releases for projects success in the real world. Agile development helps organizations build the right product. Carrying out to market software that hasn’t been written yet, agile allows teams to continuously re-plan their release to enhance its value throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace. Agile development conserves a product’s critical market importance and guarantees team’s work doesn’t wind up on a shelf.

Pre-Requisites for Agile Projects

Client:

Use of Agile assures to reduce the amount of time spent on costly rework, but this depends largely on maintaining an open discussion with business stakeholders and end users to structure and formulate requirements throughout the project lifecycle. Stakeholders should be introduced to agile concepts and business value so as to demonstrate the importance of their participation throughout the project. Involvement of multiple stakeholders with decision-making authority helps in minimizing the time required by any individual with their ongoing feedback. Clients should be available for the daily meetings (Preferably face to face through video conferencing). They should accept a different way of checking up the progress on the project. They should also provide a product owner who can help us with the requirements for the product.

Team:

Teams should start off with a set of core agile principles, and develop efficiencies by customizing them to be applied to the relevant project. Unlike any other method of development which calls for process standardization, implementing Agile successfully across different teams and project types requires flexibility to break down high-level agile concepts down into several methods for teams to master the skills. Also they should be able to work with the customer, end-user and other Non-IT people (interviews, workshops).

Organization work environment:

Iterations and flexible requirements are two chief agile concepts that organizations inculcate early among agile teams. As teams gain experience in executing projects, capture the causes of inconsistency from the project plan to incorporate those into future planning and re-evaluates the requirements backlog to ensure prioritization of the most valuable features.

Daily meetings are essential:

The daily stand-ups are essential within the SCRUM development method are valued highly within the Agile Software Management method. The few minutes of meeting at the start of each day is experienced as a positive and helpful in all aspects of the process. By effective and practical assessment, future problems can be avoided and existing problems can be solved.

Backlog administration requires regulation:

We have seen that strict documentation of all tasks is still difficult to achieve. Although the Product Software management can play a useful role in controlling process and keeping track of the progress of a sprint, the desire to keep the current set of tasks and the amount of time spent on a tasks timely is still lacking. However, one of the agile principles is facilitating the individuals and interactions over processes and tools which means as long as the work gets done, project administration becomes less important.

Agile software development stresses rapid iterations, small and frequent releases, and evolving requirements facilitated by direct user involvement in the overall development process. Hence it is subjective and substantial which development cycle to follow. In most of the cases agile proves to be one of the best methodologies used to implement the project cycle.

About Author:

Nisha Bhatt is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: nisha.bhatt@spluspl.com