Agile Software Development is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps the team to deliver value to their clients faster and with fewer hassles. Instead of focusing on big launch, the agile team delivers work in smaller chunks. The plans, results, and requirements are analyzed quickly to help team respond quickly to the changes.
The approach is adopted widely because moving too fast can lead to errors, poor user experience, and downtime. While Agile Development is quicker and prone to fewer errors with quick recovery time, companies today have adopted this approach.
What are the Objectives of Agile Development?
The objectives of agile development are:
- Improve the quality of deliverables
- Accuracy of estimates and spend less time in developing
- Better control over the project
- Handle frequent changes optimally
Following are the opportunities opened to teams through Agile Development:
- Learn lessons from the problems
- Improve problem-solving techniques
- Revamp the strategies according to the problems
- Figure out what works best
- Focused on implementation of the work
If you are looking forward to improving your software development process, this guide will help you to adopt best agile development practices.
1. Define your Goals Clearly
Developing a new software is a complicated task, but not when you have defined the criteria. The best way to start with agile development is to provide a checklist to your team. The checklist will help your team to stay aligned and focused on things that are important and needs to be done timely.
Every agile development team needs a product owner and the responsibilities include:
- Pick the best team members who would be part of your product team and ensure to keep them away from outside interference
- Set the key objectives on which your product team needs to focus and have better understanding what’s needed from their side
- Allowing the team to focus tightly on next two to three sprints and the objectives that need to be achieved in each sprint.
- During the sprint, ensure your availability all the time, in case of any questions or guidelines needed by your team. In case of unavailability, you can also transfer the responsibility to other team members.
2. Build Agile Team and Assign Respective Goals
A number of product managers commit a mistake that is critical to the success of a particular sprint. Product owners often commit picking the wrong agile team and ignoring the best ones. For instance, product teams often forget to include QA resources, which might result in errors, bugs in the demo version.
The consequences have to be nullified by putting an extra effort and time to rework on those errors and bugs. In fact, the agile development process is to avoid such discrepancies and escape extra work.
Moreover, product owners may employ too many people without justifying whether they are needed at this phase or not. For example, they may include marketing and sales team. The purpose of agile development is to focus on building the software, and not to market the product halfway through.
The team must include the following:
- The product owner who is responsible for managing the team, aligning them and setting clear goals.
- A scrum master whose primary responsibility is to translate the epics, stories and other items on your sprint. Moreover, the scrum master will also make sure that development team is fully utilized without the resources being wasted.
- QA resource who is responsible for testing the items in development, before presenting it to the product owner.
3. Include Roadmap into Your Sprint List
Mostly, product owners ask whether they need to share the roadmap of the entire year with their dev team. In general, yes product owners should share the product roadmap with the dev team. However, it is to ensure that roadmap is developed at the strategic level, easy to view and does not contain a long list of pending items. In the agile framework, the product manager should only present the roadmap in order to align the team on how the things will be delivered.
The product owner should also review the stories, epics and other things that will be due on the next sprint in order to keep their focus on the key objectives. In other words, when the sprint is over and the meeting has been concluded, the development team and the scrum team should know exactly what you need for each task listed in the upcoming sprint.
4. Remove any Distractions before Next Sprint Begins
The role of the product owner is to align their team on every sprint and make them work on the sprints without any outside distractions. It is important because product team must be clear about your expectations and things to be deployed before the sprint begins.
Once your dev team starts a sprint, there is no need to ask or tell them about the requirements. As a product owner, you should do your job in order to make sure what needs to be done so that they can deliver the best before the sprint begins.
5. Automate Everything in the Framework
Automating everything will help your team move faster and deliver on time. Moreover, they are confident about the optimal quality of the sprint being delivered. Make sure to automate the repeatable tasks wherever possible such as builds, deployments, integration tests, unit tests and regression tests.
If everything is needed to be done manually, it will result in wasted time and effort. Make sure to invest in DevOps to develop infrastructure to support the quality environments and development accessible to QA team and dev team. This practice would allow you to remove the hurdles from the process for promoting code through a wide array of environments.
Conclusion
With the help of the above-discussed practices, your company will be able to deliver optimally. The motive behind agile development is that you and your team are constantly learning from the processes and keeping an eye on what’s working and what’s not.
