Introduction

Delivering Quality at Speed’ is the success chant in today’s highly-competitive business world. The customary approaches for software development have divided development and testing into two diverse steps- developers build a feature and the QA team tests it for defects.

With the eventual growth of the product, the testing time and efforts also grow exponentially. This welcomes a cold choice for the project managers- either to delay the release or refuse to test. ‘Agile’ was born in need of a better software development approach that allows developers and testers to decrease the number of bugs in the code and to identify bugs early in the code in that order.

The agile approach helps organizations manage predictability while driving alliance and transparency across teams and adopt a different outlook to be successful. The development cycles, in an agile environment, break tasks into small increments. It supports teams to deliver working software more cooperatively and with improved quality.

The agile software development approach offers momentous benefits to the business- better competitive differentiation, accelerated time to market, high-quality software that enhances customer gratification.

The 10^th Annual State Agile Survey makes it clear that agile software development has grown progressively over the last decade. The number of organizations, comprising both the startups and large enterprises, accepting agile continues to increase each year.

We here have a quick snapshot of the top 10 reasons (as stated in the 10^th Annual State of Agile Survey) to embrace agile software delivery:

1. Speeding Product Delivery - the agile development approach allows the enterprise to deliver high-quality software within fast release cycles that is more in line with the needs of the user.

Shorter sprints in agile development approach are gaining thrust to keep up the speed of the development process constantly with the business goals.

2. Enhance abilities to manage the varying priorities - Agile software development not only requires teams to develop and test rapidly but also to deliver developments to the products and services faster to the customers.

Guaranteeing that enhancements and changes required by customers in a reliable and usable manner required to take an agile approach through every step of the project.

3. Increase efficiency - Organizations ought to be on a continuous lookout to achieve better business consequences. They require a better way to improve the methodologies and skills that IT staff practices to deliver  software.

The agile methodology allows increased productivity through more effective communication while being highly reactive to the ever-changing demands of the customers.

4. Improve software quality - In an agile environment, the development and QA teams work together aiming to develop software rapidly in close collaboration with the customer.  Agile techniques assess and improve software quality while offering increased customer value.

The development and Testing teams cooperate quite well in an agile environment and also aim to develop software rapidly in close collaboration with the customer.

5. Enhance delivery expectedness - Something clients usually care the most about is predictability. They want teams to be good at making and keeping promises, and reliably deliver work that is efficiently tested, and amended codes at the end of each sprint. Stable predictable programs are not possible without predictable and reliable teams, particularly when there are numerous dependencies among the teams.

Using an agile approach for software delivery teams can plan, coordinate and deliver enough predictability along with a release level commitment.

6. Improve business/IT placement - Organizations need to mend the business and IT placements to achieve higher value for their business. An organization needs to be effective and efficient to be competitive. The fast-changing business environment calls for invention and agility. Organizations need to focus on IT to implement the right systems in the right way to meet the needs of the business. It should step towards business/ IT alignment by aiming on a process to be improved while considering the technology and infrastructure.

An agile approach empowers the association of all the IT operational processes: Change – Problem – Incidents – IT Operations perfectly. Furthermore, it focuses on reduction in time and effort, cost and investments in designing, recording, dis-positioning and testing.

7. Improve Visibility of the Project - Visibility is the key to quickly adapt to the needed change. In the lack of project visibility, it is difficult to track and measure improvements in productivity. As much as the top management of an organization needs to know, the teams associated with the development and delivery of software should also know which direction they are heading towards.

Numerous development, testing and operation teams must be aware of the present-day state, the performance and the objective of the project and the organization. Refining the leadership and team visibility through agile approach provides customer value early and often.

8. Decrease project risk - Agile is considered an effective approach for software development that characteristically reduces the risks in software development. Software development in sprints consists of agile techniques such as sprint retrospective, sprint review etc. All these techniques provide continuous feedback which helps prevent deviations between expectations and the completed software.

Using agile, the scrum teams prioritize the highest value and highest risk requirements first. They use current agile artifacts and meanings to manage risk.

9. Improve team optimism - Agile approach emphasizes on better communication and cooperation among different teams. The nature of the agile approach is to keep the team motivated about the challenges in the future. The scrum meetings, retrospectives, prioritization, feedback mechanisms keep the team environment dynamic and up-to-the-minute. The inherent characteristics of the agile approach include Seamless communication, self-organization, high association, project visibility to all the stakeholders etc. which brings a positive change and keeps the team motivated.

Also, the communication through various forums and discussion boards are the basic fundamentals of the agile approach. The approach demands an organization to listen to its employees, communicate its strategies with employees and identify employees for their determinations and accomplishments.

10. Improve engineering discipline - Proper adoption and implementation of the principles and practices of the agile approach empower the team members to achieve and enhance the quality of software rather than just completing the work. An important component of the high-quality product is always a good and accessible design and architecture. When an organization plans to adopt the agile principles with a goal of delivering high-quality product, they should also embrace sound engineering discipline.

An impressive design, perfect configuration management and effective testing strategies are crucial to make the best use of the agility approach.

We, at Seasia Infotech work on agile practices for software testing to authorize our clients with better business outcomes. For information about our other services, visit our website.