Agile Manifesto — Principles That Defines Agile
When we hear the word Agile, we hear flexibility. Agile in terms of capability means the ability to adjust on different situations while still making the best out of it. When you hear it like that, being agile sounds like something that is hard to master.
Agility also applies to business and development. Faced by the always changing trend of todays world, those who develops should have the ability to be agile when it comes to change. And that is called Agile Development. But what is agile? what does it mean to be agile when developing? On this article I will cover principles that defines agile development.
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
Basically it means that we as a developer should constantly and as early as possible deliver an increment as a way to exchange feedbacks and better refine the software that we’re making while also fulfilling customer’s needs as fast as possible.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
It revolves around how customer can change their needs in a blink of an eye. By welcoming those challenges of changing requirements, we can be sure to know that customers will still want or need our product at the end of the delivery. we can turn a what seems to be a disadvantage on our parts to a weapon feared by others that doesn’t apply agile.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Kind of the same as the first principle, but this principle leans towards the continuous delivery aspect. It means that by frequently delivering increments on our parts, we can receive more feedbacks and avoid more bugs getting through.
In my case, using scrum as an agile framework led us to create an increment every sprint in which a sprint occurs every two weeks. That way, the development of the software will be tracked and feedbacks will be given frequently at the end of each sprint.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
In a way this means that the business aspect of the project and the developing aspect of the project should not be separated by a barrier. We have to communicate with one another frequently in order to increase mutual understanding and avoid miss information given by one part to another.
On my group project, we hold a meeting every two days explaining what each of our development team has done, will do, and their struggles doing it. In that way, if there are any miss information it will be addressed at least every two days.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
In the eye of the project manager and scrum master, they should hire individuals that are motivated to develop the software. They should also give them support if any problems come to be.
In my case as a development team, having a project manager and scrum master that’s friendly and all around easy to chat and ask questions with is enough to motivate me developing the project.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
While communicating through calls and chats are often considered enough when working collaboratively. There’s nothing better than having a face-to-face conversation with one another. Facial expressions are an effective way to convey emotions when talking with one another.
Although we’re in the middle of a pandemic, my group project usually does video calls for time and time again.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
In agile development, to measure the progress of the development we usually see how much of that development have been made into a working software. As it is customer oriented development, if you haven’t created or haven’t made progress on a working software, you haven’t created a value for your customer.
In scrum, at the end of the sprint, there is a sprint review involving stakeholders and other figures related to the software. In my case, on sprint review we as a development team present the current working software that we have develop to this day, in that way the stakeholders can measure our development progress.
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