By P Venkatesh, Director – Platforms and Solutions, Maveric Systems
There are several reasons for Agile to have caught the attention of the IT and business communities in managing technology initiatives and it is also one that has infused a fresh breath of energy and optimism. We will explore critical reasons for its popularity here.
Key reasons for its prominence
#1 Agile is indeed Agile
Let’s start from Stage 1 of the SDLC- the Requirements Definition and Management stage. Conventionally, the requirement of a business user would be transformed into a business requirement document by a Business Analyst and turned over to the business and IT community inside the organization for comments and review. It is not unusual if it takes 150 days to finalize a requirement in a large organization.
However, with Agile, in the very same large organization, Requirements Definition & Management is limited to the Product Owner who along with the Epic Owner and the Scrum master determine whether the requirement is good enough to go to a backlog and move on to a sprint. Therefore the requirements get confirmed up in less than a week. The results are obvious.
Also, the process for automating the tests within a sprint is also in a rather advanced state, thanks to the clarity in feature definition, which is the gateway that determines what will enter the sprint, and the availability of the tools along the way for each component be it the feature definition, the unit, system, integration and acceptance tests or even for the non-functional tests.
#2 Agile is outcome driven
Most methodologies prior to the advent of Agile focused on the process and it was left to the managers of those processes to drive the outcome. On the contrary, Agile is outcome driven and is improving by the day.
If there was a methodology to derive the evaluation of features, be it the Minimum Viable Feature (MVF) or the Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF), the intention is to do the minimum and build based on usage.
The behavioral driven development (BDD) unleashed a format of design which straightens out the logical thinking by deriving the output from the input by taking one step at a time in defining the process. When this is combined with the Test Driven Development (TDD) or Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), the evaluation criteria also becomes clear. It is to be noted that the test coverage in a sprint normally covers not only the functional tests, but also the non-functional tests including performance, security and fail over.
There is also an emerging model that focuses on the features that would get accomplished within a sprint as the very criteria for it getting introduced in a sprint. All these measures make agile a completely integrated solution for outcome driven development (ODD).
#3 Agile is team-led
Small is many times beautiful. Agile teams are small and therefore beautiful because:
* They close the gap – be it on feature definition or in its acceptance – between the team of business users, developers and testers in a single camp so that there is nothing lost in translation
* Decision making is aligned to the objective of meeting the scheduled features in the sprint with the laid down acceptance criteria and on time every time; such unified action always yields desired results; Has proved that smaller number of features to be accomplished over a short time is a successful mantra – Four weeks normally through a small team of not more than eight members through a set of methodologies that are ever evolving to meet the objective produces the best results from the team.
* Has a composition which rests on the hands-on approach- is very light on management and skewed towards executioners. It is no wonder that results are showing in a telling manner.
#4 Agile rests on fundamentally strong principles
In a short span of time, Agile has proved its value to all stakeholders. Yes, though it is substantially used in the digital context, let it not be forgotten that we are in the digital-first world. Also, many organizations have successfully used Agile in the transformation of business application context and realized its value.
The portfolio of process, infrastructure and people have never before been more potent than now. Their integration is so strong that it covers all the technology components and all processes in a manner that ensures quick results. It also injects the attitude to constantly look for gaps and fill them as early as possible so that the desired outcome is guaranteed.
It is hard to find anything lacking in this methodology and the few gaps here and there are already being worked on to closure.
Is Agile a panacea for all IT faults?
Agile is currently being used only for software development and in some instances for maintenance. It is yet to morph to a form that would include other branches such as infrastructure, support and operations.
On the software development side, let us consider the current achievement of this methodology against the avowed objective of Quality, Time and Economy/Cost (QTE). On the first two, certainly there has been a marked progress. Hard reliable data might just be emerging shortly on this.
The cost has marginally increased. It is our view that the comparison here is not on even ground- there are hidden costs in the earlier system that are not being fully factored in for comparison. This system enables a more accurate capture of cost since it is in a single set up cutting across features and from requirements to release.
