Agile, and it’s most popular implementation Scrum, is becoming standard in software development. Yet, each organization’s journey to Agile adoption is different, and is not always smooth. Scrum adoption is often a significant change in how the organization functions, a change that requires people to assume new roles, acquire new competencies, develop new relationships.
So, why Agile? Changing the organization is hard work, risky, and painful. What does Scrum deliver to the organization?
There are a lot of great ways how Agile and Scrum can make a software development organization more productive and successful. Lets look at some of them.
- Scrum can help restructure and reduce delivery risk and increase predictability: potentially shippable software in small chunks, delivered frequently. The most important structural element of Scrum methodology requires delivering working software every 2-3-week iteration. The product must be ready to ship or release. Continuous focus on upcoming delivery forces the organization to focus on finishing up work quickly, and allows to deliver often and on-time.
- Scrum helps deliver a better product, by encouraging earlier incremental delivery, and regular and frequent communication with customers and stakeholders during development. Frequent incremental deliveries allow to collect feedback on the incrementally delivered, yet already useful, software. Short iteration cycle allows the team to accommodate desired changes as requests come in during the development cycle.
- Agile and Scrum recognize and encourage better software engineering practices, to improve and maintain higher technical quality of the product. Higher software quality allows for fewer bugs, shorter time and less effort adding new functionality and fixing defects, and makes it easier for new developers to become productive working on the product. Commonly suggested practices are automated builds, frequent or continuous integration, automated developer and acceptance testing, requiring and maintaining code quality using automated code analysis tools and code reviews.
- Scrum helps organizations achieve better ROI by delivering better product earlier, and working incrementally. The customers get a chance to start working with the incrementally delivered product earlier. The organization enjoys an even-paced delivery schedule that builds trust with stakeholders, improves morale, and limits pressure and stress.
- Agile approach to software development is built around the understanding that creating software is an inherently complex and complicated business, with tremendous upside, expensive downside, and high uncertainty. Scrum and other Agile frameworks do a great job to allow for experimentation by limiting the impact of mistakes. In order to succeed in a creative enterprise, errors should be allowed and encouraged, and it helps if the mistakes are cheap and easy to identify and fix. Agile encourages communication and experimentation, makes mistakes cheap and visible, and thus creates perfect condition for hitting the ultimate project jack-pot.
Have you considered adopting Agile? What are your reasons for the change?
