Top Reasons for Choosing Agile Software Development and Testing
- Reading time: 4 minutes
Agile Methodology is a best-practice approach to the software development process. When it’s done right, Agile helps teams improve software quality, reduce development costs, and bring a superior finished product to market much faster than would be possible otherwise.
The Agile process is characterized by what is known as “sprints.” Each sprint is focused on obtaining a single objective in a short, well-defined duration. Sprints maximize team collaboration as everybody, regardless of the task they are focused on, is working toward the same end result.
Benefits of Agile Methodologies
If you’re not leveraging Agile in your software development workflows, here are some of the top reasons why you should start now:
Five Tips to Supercharge Your Team’s Agile Velocity
- Agile Reduces Maintenance and Associated Costs. Technical debt tends to rise quickly when teams are focused on new features. In Agile methodology, changes or defects are added to a product backlog, which is quickly addressed during sprint planning.
- Adapt to Change More Quickly. Adaptability and agility are the hallmarks of Agile. Changes are approved quickly, added to the backlog, and scheduled based on business need and priority.
- Minimize Risk. In traditional development workflows, testing is left to the end, and if the product isn’t suitable for the customer’s needs, the team is back at square one. Agile sprints help teams stay on track, enabling ongoing adjustments and ensuring the product meets expectations.
- Collaboration, Alignment, and Transparency. Sprint planning validates every aspect of the project before it starts. Involving the project owner, developers, analysts, and testers from the outset ensure that the customer’s needs are satisfied.
- Superior Quality. Agile teams focus on specific features for each sprint, including every aspect needed to complete those items in their entirety, including testing the result. Traditional dev workflows often get bogged down with too much complexity, leaving little time for adequate testing, resulting in marginal quality and additional work for the team.
- More Reliable Timelines. Agile enables more accurate estimates for delivery dates, helping customers plan their rollout and marketing strategies more reliably.
- Improves Engagement. All stakeholders, including the project owner, are fully engaged with each sprint, ensuring a high level of involvement and a sense of ownership that does not often occur in traditional waterfall workflows.
- Customer Satisfaction. When the product owner is engaged with each sprint, it improves customer satisfaction by a significant margin. In addition, when it’s possible to see and test a working iteration of the product after each sprint, it fosters confidence, excitement, and pride in the result.
- More Precise Project Control. Because of the collaborative nature of Agile, teams are always on the same page about what they’re doing and why. As a result, agile reduces last-minute “surprises” that could derail progress, and any concerns are dealt with quickly.
In conclusion, Agile is the most cost-effective, collaborative, and efficient way to approach software development. In today’s highly competitive software development landscape, your dev team needs to deliver quality at scale and help you get to market —and when reliable results are needed, Agile methodology is the clear solution.
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