Why Use the Agile Framework?
In today’s economy, organizations seek ways to stay ahead of the competition. Time-to-market and product quality are critical. Companies need ways to get their products and services to their customers more quickly without compromising on the quality. The Agile framework offers a number of advantages for both the organizations that build products and services as well as for the consumers who use them. Some of these advantages are:
- Faster delivery
- Improved quality
- Customer satisfaction
Faster Delivery
By using shorter development cycles, Agile teams are able to delivery products and services more quickly to their customers. Teams should have potentially shippable products at the end of each cycle, every 1-4 weeks. Products and services are considered “potentially shippable”, but there is no requirement that teams actually deliver their products at the end of each development period. Product owners and stakeholders collaborate to determine whether enough of the functionality exists to deliver the product at the end of a given development cycle. With Agile development, the shorter development cycles provide teams more opportunities to deliver functionality than they would have if they used a more traditional development model, such as Waterfall.
Improved Quality
Agile focuses on “working software” as part of its core values. In addition to this mandate to produce functional products, the acceleration of the development process provides an opportunity for teams to focus on quality. Shorter development cycles result in the frequency of product builds available for testing. Teams are able to quickly find and fix product issues.
Customer Satisfaction
Agile development is based on requirements that are outlined in units known as user stories. User stories describe the feature functionality to be delivered from the perspective of the customer. Members of the Agile team are focused on gathering customer requirements to ensure that the features that are most in demand are prioritized for delivery. Because the teams work in short development cycles, they can deliver these highly desirable features more quickly. They can also adjust quickly to changes in customer requirements.