12 Agile Principles We follow for Rapid Product Engineering
Product companies and ISVs race to keep up with the evolving technology landscape. There are multiple new business opportunities for product companies, but they are unable to leverage on all due to challenges such as achieving faster time to market, engineering web and mobile products for the cloud, providing elegant user experience and reducing the overall market risk.
According to Atlassian 2016 software development trend report, 80% of all software organizations practise agile development to mitigate such challenges and GTM fast.
Given the benefits of Agile methodologies, we follow the below outlined Agile practices:
- Daily Standups
- Automated functional testing
- Two way communication with the client
- Overlap of at least two hours with client’s time zone
- Iterative & test driven development
- CI/CD
- Retrospective
Apart from aforementioned practices, we strictly adhere to all the Agile principles.
Here’s how we embed 12 Agile principles to develop innovative products with faster time to market.
1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of software
We ensure continuous delivery of products so that companies can roll it out in the market faster. With early market feedback, it is easy to accommodate changes and develop profitable products that impact bottom lines. Iterative development involves the customer at every stage, this results into instant gratification.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late into development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
Change is the only constant in agile development. We incorporate the feedback even if it’s too late. We ensure quick implementation of feedback so that the time to market isn’t compromised.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Delivering fully functional product is much easier with Agile methodologies than traditional approaches as Agile doesn’t focus on creating a lot of documentation for gathering requirements. As we cut down the time between planning and delivery, working software is delivered frequently for continuous feedback.
4. The management and developers must work together daily throughout the project
We ensure that there is consistent communication between our development SPOC and customers. This ensures clear understanding of requirements ab-initio. With no time gap in communication, customers get faster time to market and shorter release cycles.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
Agile eliminates the need of micromanaging people. We have some of the best hand-picked teams that are efficient in delivering products according to the project plan. We keep our team members motivated and trust them completely to enable timely project delivery.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Face to face suggestions, feedback, questions and answers help accelerate time to market drastically than exchanging long emails or project notes. Our team uses various video chatting tools, personal meetings and other tools required to put a face to the conversation and carry on detailed communication on a daily basis.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Product performance is considered as one of the key parameters for judging the agile team’s success. If the product isn’t working after thorough testing and debugging, despite agile, this will hamper the GTM and MVP approach. We ensure successful project delivery and optimum product performance with constant feedback and continuous delivery.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Team burnout is at times the common problem especially in products that undergo multiple iterations overtime. Our Agile project managers ensure that the work is carried out at the same pace across product development lifecycle ensuring sustainability. Increasing or decreasing the pace might hamper the long term project goals.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Technical excellence is at the core of the entire product engineering lifecycle. Clean and well commended code is the need of the hour. Each iteration should better the code. Our Agile teams use various methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban to review the product development at various phases. If iterative code cleaning is not followed, it becomes traditional and sequential.
10. Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
Agile focuses on simplicity. We avoid writing lengthy unnecessary code that doesn’t help build a great product. Agile also focuses on eliminating extra processes, code and steps written with future requirement in mind. This is where agile is linked with Lean which focuses on reducing waste and creating a lean process.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
The team does not need a single project manager responsible to lead the project and guide who is going to do what, when, and how. If teams have all the necessary roles and skills to create the wanted product, they are able to decide and organize by themselves. They can come up with product designs and architectures themselves.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Adapt new philosophies at regular intervals if required – this is one of the crucial principles of Agile. Doing the same things repetitively over a period of time can slow down the adaptability and flexibility. With technology evolution, things change quickly and for products requiring development time of around a year or more, team should think on how to become more effective and adjust its behavior accordingly.
Agile is a sure fire way to build disruptive products and launch them ahead of the competition. We will share more insights about effective product engineering using Agile methodologies in one of our upcoming whitepapers. You will be able to download this whitepaper from our insights section very soon.
