Agile Methodology
“Market Readiness drives product success and being agile is all about being Market Ready, Software product development is one area where being rigid, just makes you more fragile”
You don’t want to build a software product that can’t adapt to what is selling in the market. You need frequent inspection on how things shape and you need to be in touch with the reality to mold your product vision and be able to sense your customers.
One significant element that I believe was missing in the traditional software development process was the inability to move in the fast lane while riding a consumer product roadmap. For any young company it was also important that they are able to steer their application through all narrow lanes of market demand.
What else is better than being able to be market evolved, having the utmost ability to build only that really works saving both money and time.
Agile software development has given the industry a group of software development methodologies that are based on similar principles like frequent inspection and adaptation. A leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals which in one way or other is addressing what the Market needs for you to be profitable.
Agile chooses to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. It takes out the enormous time that normal methods spend on planning over an already planned and documented program.
Communication is the key to success in agile development, but I guess for that matter it is the key to any success you can name.
Though Agile emphasizes on face-to-face communication over written documents and recommends a typical agile team to locate in a single open office to facilitate such communication agile models are actively evolving in the offshore outsourcing paradigm.
While offshoring, the best way is to first try and achieve success in smaller development efforts where a Small Team size (5-9 people) comes into play and have product ownership shared between offshore and onshore team heads. In these cases including a customer representative as a team member will help manage team collaboration considerably.
For Larger development efforts it need be delivered by multiple teams which require a coordination of priorities across teams. Scrum, Extreme Programming, Agile Unified Process etc are some of the noted agile software development methods that we will explore in the coming days
