In recent years, there has been a spike in entrepreneurship. Startups are recognizing the importance of technology to reach out to more customers. In keeping with the importance of mobility in today’s world, many startups are focusing on developing applications to support their business, for mobile platforms. The work dynamics and development processes followed in a startup could be different from those in large corporations because the needs and objectives of a startup can be vastly different from their ultimate vision.
For a startup whose main focus is on technology, following a rigid model such as the traditional waterfall model is very difficult. Many startups are adopting an agile methodology for their software development purposes because it is more adaptable to their constantly changing needs. Agile methodology is successful for large companies through various case studies and research papers. Different developers may have their understanding/interpretation of the agile model. In the absence of an experienced agile developer who has a clear understanding of the philosophy behind agile, the entire development process may become disorderly.
AGILE Model
In an agile model, there is a continuous iteration of development and testing in the software development lifecycle. It is a customer-centric process that laid focuses on team collaboration, learning, faster feedback, and tangible results. It permits more communication between remote developers, managers, testers, and customers. The whole software development process works smoothly in Agile.
Agile has become the word of the mouth of every techie in recent years. Agile is becoming popular in the digital world due to its undeniable benefits and outstanding software development. If an enterprise wants to have tangible results, transparency, and partnership in your outsourced projects, better to opt for agile methodology. Startups can perform much better if follows managed agile and outsourcing effectively-Transforming IT development, reducing cost, and providing access to a large pool of tech-savvy talent.
Key Principles That Guide AGILE Project Management
- Customer satisfaction is always the highest priority and is achieved through rapid and continuous delivery.
- Changing environments are incorporated at any stage of the process to provide the customer with a competitive advantage.
- A product or service is delivered with a higher frequency.
- Stakeholders and developers collaborate closely daily.
- All stakeholders and team members remain motivated for optimal project outcomes, while teams are provided with all the necessary tools and support, and are trusted to accomplish project goals.
- Face-to-face meetings are deemed the most efficient and effective format for project success.
- A final working product is the ultimate measure of success.
- Sustainable development is accomplished through agile processes whereby development teams and stakeholders can maintain a constant and ongoing pace.
- Agility is enhanced through a continuous focus on technical excellence and proper design.
- Simplicity is an essential element.
- Self-organizing teams are most likely to develop the best architectures and designs and to meet requirements.
- Regular intervals are used by teams to improve efficiency through fine-tuning behaviors.
A startup doesn’t need a prefixed number of teams as it starts to talk about bringing to the company AGILE values like transparency, flexibility, and scalability. It doesn’t need a team in each area of the organization. A startup is a company, usually with limited resources, which has to be very efficient to reach its goals.
According to a study, inefficient internal communications and the failure situations it provokes has a cost of over 15% of the annual company profits. Looking for efficiency and good management processes to avoid and to reduce this statistic is an entrepreneur’s duty.
To respect AGILE and cultural values in today’s startups, every team has to be well connected. These connections have to be defined through flexible, scalable, and very open communication channels. To make this structure work, every team and every team member has to have a direct connection, following the right communication patterns, to their counterparts in other company teams.
Although designed originally for the software industry, many industries now use agile when developing products and services because of the highly collaborative and more efficient nature of the methodology.
The Benefits of AGILE
Agile was developed to streamline and improve the development process to rapidly identify and adjust for issues and defects. It provides a way for developers and teams to deliver a better product, in a faster manner, through short, iterative, interactive sessions/sprints. In the era of digital transformation, with many companies migrating to a digital workplace, agile is a perfect fit for organizations looking to transform how they manage projects and operate as a whole. Agile can help ensure company-wide process and methodological alignment.
- Agile Ensures Collaboration And Cooperation of IT Teams
Agile methodology permit startups to face market challenges. The onshore and offshore IT teams maintain working code in short sprints and Iterations and deliver the product doing error detection and recovery at every iteration. Agile development and remote engineering teams complement each other when working interchangeably. Agile and outsourcing –both practices permit companies to engage developers around the globe to build chunks of code in a streamlined manner.
- Agile Facilitates Scalability
With agile methodology practicing with outsourcing, the client can flexibly add on the number of teams or employees if required. If a specific skill set is needed in a particular team in between can be easily set accordingly. Integration issues are solved sooner as they rise, the overall product quality is higher, and the team works productively throughout the development cycle.
- Agile Guarantees Cost Flexibility
Agile IT outsourcing facilitates start-ups with innovative technologies and solutions at a very feasible cost. Startup entrepreneurs can outsource offshore teams if needed in the software development lifecycle. It incurs a very less cost to them as there are no overhead costs involved in comparison to in house team.
- Agile Ensures Higher Productivity And improved Product Visibility
Working as a single team doesn’t always come as easy as you’d expect. There are certain rules, tight schedules, rigid timelines, pressure, and many more. It’s not just limited to productivity and timely delivery. There are a lot more things to be emphasized. But Agile comes up with a feature that facilitates teams to work in agile sprints-sharing detailed information across teams, creating MVPs, solving bugs instantly, timely feedback, open to adapting instant changes if required.
- Agile Can change Priorities Without Affecting Software Quality
As in agile practice, the work-flows in short and realistic sprints, the teams can easily prioritize the main tasks in between them, without interrupting the whole development process.
Benefits Specifically to Startups
- Reduce development cost and time
- Increase business
- Feedback driven product delivered at the promised time
- No overhead costs
- Timely product check and updates
Popular AGILE Methodologies
Within Agile, there are some frequently used or popular methods, with Scrum, Kanban, and Lean being the most popular. Some agile methods include:
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Lean (LN)
- Dynamic System Development Model, (DSDM)
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Crystal
- Adaptive software development (ASD)
- Agile Unified Process (AUP)
- Crystal Clear methods
- Disciplined agile delivery
- Feature-driven development (FDD)
- Scrumban
- RAD (Rapid Application Development)
