alameensoft with Agile

What is Agile?

Agile Software Development is gaining popularity. But, what does it mean to be agile? Is it using unit testing, continuous integration, following Scrum?

Most of teams believe that they are agile because they are following a predefined set of practices such as daily meeting, sprint planning meeting or retrospective meeting.

Most of teams are making a mistake which is that tend to treat with agile practices as Religious rites, so they are focusing on the doing the ritual not on doing the practice correctly so that they take advantage of the purpose for which that practice is created.

Being agile is much more than applying or adopting practices and techniques to run software, teams must focus on the values, principles and then selecting and applying the right practices based on their understanding the purpose for which practices are created.

Therefore, agility is not a silver bullet process that can be mastered, it is not a methodology or a recipe for success. But mindset and objective comes from agile values and principles must always working to reach it.

Agile Manifesto

In February 2001, seventeen representatives from the different agile methods decided to form an Agile Alliance to better promote their views and what emerged was the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto.

The values honored by the agilest are presented in the Manifesto for agile software development where agile manifesto is a document developed and signed by a group of agile proponents known as the Agile Alliance.

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others does it. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation.
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
  • Responding to change over following a plan.

That is while there is value in the items on the right; we value the items in the left more.”

Agile Principles

As the Agile Manifesto site states, the characteristics of agile methods are elaborately defined in the twelve principles behind the agile manifesto:

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  • Deliver working software frequently, from couple of weeks to a couple of months, with preference to the shorter time scale.
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  • Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhance agility.
  • Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
  • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing team
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Agile methods encourage programmers to drop their heavyweight process chains, embrace change, and escape into agility. Advocated methods have short cycle times, close customer involvement, and an adaptive rather than predictive mindset.

Agile Methods Practices

One of the main reasons for the use of the agile practices has been their ability to increase flexibility and other alameensoft ability to respond to changes. Each agile method has some practices of its own that are used while adoption of this method, some of these practices are similar others may have different conventions but same purpose, others totally differs.

We took an approach to identify a list of all the agile practices. The approach was to collect all agile practices used by current agile development methods, the collection process weight includes grouping similar practices together, and the result was a set of 40 different agile practices. This compilation provides a starting point, but does not by any means limit agile practices to this list only. Below listed some of the most common practice from those 40:

  • Self-Organizing team.
  • Frequent intensive communication.
  • Test Driven Development.
  • Pair Programming.
  • Re-factoring and Continuous improvement.
  • No big design up front (BDUF).
  • Unit Tests.
  • Coding standards.
  • Continuous integration.
  • Smaller and more frequent releases.
  • Customer immediately accessible (On-site Customer).
  • Collaborative teams and Empowered and motivated teams.
  • Collaborative planning.
  • Daily progress tracking meetings
  • User Stories.
  • Software configuration management.
  • Client driven iterations.
  • Continuous customer satisfaction feedback.

Each of these practices when used in software development moves us a step forward to being agile.

Acquired Benefits of Agile Application

As we introduced benefits of CMMI application, here also we introduce some of benefits make alameensoft selects Agile practices in process improvement:

  • Focus on business needs and priorities.
  • Providing customers more voice in the products and services they receive.
  • Lightweight proven approaches that work well for small co-located with embedded customer.
  • Easy to understand and adapt.
  • Provide practitioners more voice in the process they use.
  • Concise and practical approach of planning.
  • Capture what is already done well.
  • Small iterations encourage, evaluate, and implement feedback and improvement suggestions.
  • Benefits of iteration measure and feedback.

So alameensoft concerning agile methodologies has started back in 2012 with the vision about methodologies and their effect and aspects on the software development industry. Therefore, we have started to implement agile approach with one called Scrum lately in our development projects, which has given us the ability to respond to any change that alameensoft customers requires. We have ensured delivery time along with participating with our valued customer day-by-day during the entire project period.