Management Of Incremental Software Development Across Cross Functional Teams

Many business use the agile organizational methodology. As they require the ability to remain flexible, enduring ever-changing requirements. The agile organization develops more mission-critical, high-profile systems. Sharing responsibility within small teams (of 15 or less) is also a main principle of an agile organization. Never is a hierarchy design operational in the agile organization, as the group possess the ability to over ride decisions made by management. The agile type of organization displayed itself over time as an entrepreneurial type of organization providing the high-speed changing rather than the standardization of a bureaucratic organization (Johnson, Jackson, & Burrows, 2011).

Agile techniques should be used to solve the current issues faced by the company as agile techniques normally being used by the software industry help the business to act in response under the unpredictable situations faced. In Agile methodologies opportunities are been provided to evaluate whether the project is under the direction all through its development cycle. All this is being accomplished with the help of regular tempo kept in work, and the teams must show a product which is having the desired potential.

The purpose of this report is to define and discuss the use of agile methodologies. Agile is becoming a more popular term within the information technology industry and this report will help those unfamiliar with its techniques understand how agile works. The goal is also to inform the readers why agile can be preferred over traditional methods. While reading this report, it is recommended to keep in mind that agile is an alternative to using the traditional systems development lifecycle method.

Agile is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework, with "just enough" ceremony, that produces high quality solutions, in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders [1].

One of the most prevalent approaches companies utilize today is Agile. The Agile approach was developed to mitigate many of the shortcomings of Waterfall. “The agile development

Agile Development is a term coined in 2001 during two-day meeting between seventeen people who gathered at Snowbird Ski Resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah(Highsmith, 2001)[3]. The people gathered were the software pioneers trying to establish a common ground and a united stance in worldwide software development community. The outcome was an extraordinary Agile Manifesto for software development. The below table gives an influential value set from The Agile Manifesto of 2001.

This essay involves the comparison and contrast of the different methodologies used by programming teams. Among these methodologies are; System development life cycle (SDLC), Extreme programming and Agile methodology. Software development methodologies are the frameworks involved to structure, plan and control the processes used in developing an information system. The system development life cycle (SDLC) is a conceptual model which is involved in most project management and used for large scale projects with relatively large number of developers. A good example of SDCL methodologies includes; waterfall model. The SDCL takes a lot of time to produce complete products but of high quality. Agile methodology is a conceptual framework used also in project management and it is designed for small projects with few developers. Extreme programming on the other hand allow for communication with customers and by doing so it ensures interaction between developers and consumers in order to change as fast as the customers' needs and desires changes. Even though there different methodologies, agile methodologies seem to have a lot of advantages over the Extreme programming and system development life cycle. Since it combines a number of other methodologies to come up with a better way for developer to produce faster and change to as customers desires changes.

The way that software is developed has been rapidly evolving over time, going through many iterations, one genre of which is Agile software development. The Agile Manifesto1 was published in 2001, however the ideas behind it have existed and used since the early 1970’s when E. A. Edmonds published a paper that introduced the idea of an adaptive software development process2. Then in the 1990’s there was a rapid evolution of software development processes. This lead to the creation of scrum in 1995, extreme programming in 1996 and feature-driven development in 1997. Though they were devised before the Agile Manifesto was created, they now all fall under Agile software development. Agile software development methods are generally considered much better than previous methods, such as the Waterfall method, though it is still considered to be in its early stages with many issues3.

Agile methodology is sound approach for software development. The main focus is on people. Customer as well as team members are base of success and failure of a project in agile environment (Mohammad et al., 2013). Agile methodology is based on some core values and principles that should be followed by an agile practitioner while developing projects in agile environment (Stellman & Greene, 2014). The main characteristics of agile includes its iterative nature, high customer satisfaction and quick adaptation to changes (Sharma, Sarkar, & Gupta, 2012).

Agile methodologies are a relatively new set of software development approaches created to tackle traditional method’s issues and increase productivity and accuracy of software systems produced by a self-organised team of developers. Agile methods increase productivity which means more frequent delivery to clients and faster completion times. This shorter time span between deliveries means high-priority functions are implemented first and so more value is delivered to the clients during development,

[1]The Agile software development (ASD) methodologies have been established in various streams like academic, educational and also in professional software development. Understanding of how ASD methodologies are used, the kind of acceptance, successes and failures they have in the mentioned streams would be the main exploration. The findings from the web-based survey of Microsoft employees who involved in development, testing and management have indicated that around one-third of the people use ASD and the SCRUM is the most popular ASD methodology. [2]Agile methods can be mainly used in environments which are unpredictable and helps in succeeding over such environments which are in the reality today.

Software development is one of the highest demands in all over the world. We use software development techniques to solve the problems and to satisfy customers. Agile software development is a conceptual framework for software; it is also a group of software development methods based on iterative development. In 2001, agile software development was created by seventeen people with a desire to find alternative approaches to software development. The most important thing about agile methods are team work, conveying information to the team, face to face conversation, and satisfy the customer. There are various methodologies but I am going to describe the most popular ones.

“The waterfall model is a sequential design process, used in software development processes, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction,

In agile development model, the development of software is in incremental, rapid cycles. It is building new features on previous functionality with each small incremental release. The software quality is maintained by rigorously testing each release. It is useful for time critical applications. The most well-known current agile development life cycle model is Extreme Programming (XP).

For businesses that aim to develop new services or products in an interactive yet a disciplined manner, this feature is perfect. It offers agile support for a seamless workflow. Agile software development is a group of software comprising of development methodologies. These methodologies are predominantly based on iterative development. It provides businesses an environment where solutions evolve through interaction and collaboration within self-organizing and cross-functional teams.