Introduction
According to Matt Davies Stockton, businesses have experimented with different strategies for developing software over the decades. In recent years, agile software development has been the industry trend for the right reasons. Let’s check out the benefits of agile software development.
The Benefits
- Collaboration with clients – Agile software development allows your team to collaborate with the clients on multiple occasions. This strategy encourages client participation before, during, and after the product is developed.
Since the client is involved at every step of the project, it allows your team to have a deeper understanding of the client’s requirements and realize their vision with more sincerity. It allows your business to stay more competitive since you get to deliver high-quality software that helps with client retention and increases their trust in your business.
- Deadlines can be met – In agile software development, your team divides the project into fixed schedule Sprints that stretch to a few weeks. This allows you to deliver new features frequently and quickly. Your deadlines and software updates are accurate and on time and any client would love that kind of predictability.
- Transparency – As mentioned above, with the agile approach, clients are more involved at every step of the project. That means they get to have a say when features are prioritized, and iterations are planned. They even get to participate in review sessions and software build planning where new features are to be added or removed. This kind of transparency is unprecedented in most other software development strategies.
- Room for changes – With the agile strategy, the team has to provide a subset of features of the product at each iteration. However, if there’s no room for change, it makes the “agile” in the name of the strategy meaningless. With each iteration, the team also gets to refine and change their priorities. Backlog items, both new or changed can be easily planned for the next iteration and that means meaningful and valuable changes are possible within weeks.
- User-focused – With the agile strategy, you’ll use acceptable business criteria and user stories to come up with the product features. That means your team gets to focus on the actual needs of real users. Each feature that gets added isn’t just a hollow IT component but adds value for the users. You also get to beta test the software after each Sprint and get valuable feedback from real users to refine the product.
- Improved quality – When the project is broken down into several manageable units, your team gets to focus on development and testing without compromising on quality. Moreover, as frequent builds are delivered and tested at each iteration, the quality improves every time.
Conclusion
Matt Davies Stockton suggests that you adopt agile software development for your business if it suits your needs. One of the greatest benefits of such a strategy is that it encourages client participation and helps you develop a good product without breaking the schedule.
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