The Advantage Of Agile Development

The Advantage Of Agile Development Many of us have wondered what is agile development? But companies and businesses of different industries across the levels are investing more on software and web applications to get the whole operation streamlined. To cater these requirements, software and development companies are implementing those software development methodologies, which are more cost effective, and provide a collaborative working environment during project development. Agile software development is one such methodology that is being widely used by offshore software development companies in order to deliver projects in more effective manner.

http://www.agiledevelopment.org/ Agile software development methodology was introduced in the year 2001 under the Agile Manifesto. During any project development the business requirements & specifications, assigned tasks, and priorities could be changed. Considering this, agile methods are considered very useful and practical in this scenario. It consists of software development methodologies which are based on iterative and incremental method of development. The whole development is done with effective collaboration between small cross-functional and self-organized teams and client. It

provides a greater flexibility where whole project could be split into different small phases or stages with specific time assigned respectively. This helps to complete the whole project in more efficient manner with given time.

Agile development is driven by certain set of beliefs and principles.

According to these beliefs, communication and interaction at individual level needs to be done in prioritized manner along with agile development tools and processes. It insists that, the human interaction and communication plays pivot role during project development. It gives the primary importance to a working software in comparison to documentation. Though, detailed documentation is required but, it is much better to present the development process through working software during client interaction. It is very important to have effective collaboration and communication with client on frequent basis during each phase of project development. It insists, there should be a proper mechanism for responding to changes requested during the development process. However, planning is an essential step but, there might be cases where some changes are requested from client due to some factors such as market condition. Therefore, effective change management system plays very crucial part in agile development.

Agile methods does not have long-term planning, instead it focused on breaking the tasks with small increments. In Iteration process, activities are divided into short time frames from one to four weeks. Every time frame or iteration consists of a small team that works on all components of software development cycle named-requirement analysis, design, coding, unit testing and acceptance testing. Further, it helps in minimizing the risk involved if, there is any changes are suggested during the development. It is expected to have a product release at the end of each iteration with least bugs.

Generally, teams are small, self-organized and cross-functional with less influence of any corporate hierarchy. The team size could be of 5 to 9 members. Each team member considered responsible for tasks assigned in iteration. Most of the time, the communication is face-to-face in case, the team is in same place. There is close co-operation between developers and business end. One person is appointed by stakeholder who can interact with development team during the iteration process. As a measure of success, a working software is considered the best way to show the development process.

There are various types of agile methods in practice, such as ' agile modeling, agile modified process, essential unified process, dynamic systems development method, extreme programming, open unified process, feature driven development, scrum and velocity tracking.

Sustainability, effective change management, customer satisfaction by delivering the project with effective collaboration at both client and development end are few prime objectives of agile development. Effective resource allocation and optimal resource utilization makes it more cost effective methods of software development. Because of above mentioned benefits, Offshore

agile software web development has become one of the most preferred options among web development companies across the globe.