Why Agile software development?
Why Agile Software Development?
Agile projects are successful three times more often than non-agile projects, according to the 2011 CHAOS Manifesto from the Standish Group. The report goes so far as to say, "The agile process is the universal remedy for software development project failure. Software applications developed through the agile process have three times the success rate of the traditional waterfall method and a much lower percentage of time and cost overruns." The Standish Group defines project success as on time, on budget, and with all planned features. They do not report how many projects are in their database but say that the results are from projects conducted from 2002 through 2010. The following graph shows the specific results reported.
Agile Software Development Companies Key Success Factors
In the sphere of information technologies and software development, Agile has been widely buzzed recently. The main idea of agile software development is using light but effective rules of project behavior and communication between people.
Placing software on the Internet has increased the competition between software development companies as ever before. If you want to be successful in this business you have to develop high quality software with few or no bugs as well as, which is in fact even more important, follow the software market trends and requirements and adjust your work according to them. Want to be the first in software development business? Be the first in introducing innovations in this sphere.
There are three types of software developers who treat Agile in different ways. The first group ignores it; the second group understands its great nature but doesn’t know how to use it; the third group uses it extensively.
The main concepts of the Agile technology are Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development, Unit Testing, and Scrum.
Extreme Programming is a part of software development process whose main values are simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. Twelve practices are described in XP whose purpose is to bring together the whole team for performing the task successfully.
Test Driven Development represents one of the twelve software development practices which presuppose that test cases are implemented before the final implementation of the software. Modeling of test cases is performed according to Unit Testing principles when software is divided into separate units that can be tested separately.
SCRUM is a methodology of flexible software development of small iterations. As a rule, such iterations are from 1 to 3 weeks long, called sprints. Before launching software development process, a product backlog should be formed, where all features of the future product are listed. At the beginning of each sprint, the backlogs are reviewed to form a list to be done in the following sprint.
So in short, Agile Software Development includes Extreme Programming methodologies as its Engineering part and SCRUM as its project management part, which both encourage the similar iterative manner to provide high quality software product in cost effective manner.
