the red penguin
8. What is Agile Development?
Agile is a methodology for organising projects using an iterative and incremental approach to product development.
It allows your projects to be more flexible and adaptive to changes and supports more frequent delivery of drafts or product iterations.
The Agile Manifesto is a set of standards for setting up projects with minimal bureaucracy.
The guidelines are:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
It’s similar to user-centred design practices. Agile and UCD can work well together.
Customer satisfaction is achieved by following a process of continuous improvement.
Therefore, we build products by iterating and improving on our MVP (Minimal Viable Product). This has the added benefit of reducing friction with customers, who get a working version of our software after each iteration.
A minimum viable product is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. A focus on releasing an MVP means that developers potentially avoid lengthy and unnecessary work.
Requirements and people can also change over time. We have to be prepared to adapt to this.
The conclusion is that collaboration benefits everyone. Customers get a working software in increments, which reduces need for training and disruptions, developers get to focus on small features at a time.
However, Agile isn’t a free-for-all. It’s still a disciplined approach to project management that requires complete project planning for each sprint or phase before execution. Agile focuses on creating only critical documentation, such as product requirements — after all, with daily meetings, lengthy reports should be unnecessary.
Agile is not an excuse for low quality, either. Just because your next iteration is in two weeks doesn’t mean the current one is allowed to be inadequate — Agile aims to provide a workable product at the end of each phase.
Questions:
Agile is focused on:
sustainable development OR being as productive as possible?
Answer: sustainable development.
Which of these practices is fundamental to agile?
self-organising teams OR project managers assigning roles and tasks to individuals
Answer: self-organising teams.
The agile manifesto describes:
face-to-face conversations as being the most efficient way to communicate information OR the utilisation of tools and technologies to manage complex processes
Answer: face-to-face conversations
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