Quality, Flexibility And Business Value Of Software Solutions

“Agile” was first introduced in 2001, by a team of software engineers looking to improve their adaptiveness and responsiveness to ever-changing requirements. Not knowing where to begin, the team began by formulating principles, which they would use to guide their new development process. Which, in turn, lead to the creation of the Agile Manifesto, and thus a new methodology was born.

The Agile Methodology Principles makes the development much faster because the primary importance is given to the customer satisfaction and continuously delivers product. Even though requirements change at the ending phase the product is developed. The Agile development insist the self-organizing team which can create requirements, best architectures, best models. The Agile development promotes a distinct way of thinking to build things and methods to deliver continuous improvement of product. It facilitates to make best practices and decisions together. It a development to promote the adaptive planning, continuous improvement, evolutionary development and delivery, and required time to complete work. It encourages for rapid response to change in the whole development cycle. The project team prefers agile development to move in a creative and quick way. The project progress also depends on working software and project environment and support is provided and built by the individuals. They promote the sustainable environment. Constant attention is provided to the technical excellence and best models are given by the agile methodology. This principle helps the project team members

One of the initial steps in researching a problem is to know exactly what the problem is and compose a problem statement that unambiguously identifies and defines the problem to research. Sekaran (2003) said, “No amount of good research can find solutions to the situation, if the critical issue or the problem to be studied is not clearly pinpointed” (p. 69). The area of research for this paper focuses on software development, in particular, the study of agile software development methodologies and if these methodologies are successful in delivering software on time, within budget, and includes the requested features.

This paper will take a in depth look at what makes AGILE “AGILE”, including the history, uses, and arguments for and against its use.

Agile Software Development: The iterative development strategy focuses on incremental delivery of usable software ("What is Agile Software Development?", 2017)

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].

Agile methods are one of the most recently conceived methodologies for developing software intensive systems. Agile methods refer to a family of methods that tend to favor working code over documentation, individuals over tools, collaboration over negotiation and thriving in volatile environments over following a plan ("Agile Manifesto" 2001). However, agile methods are not indicated for all projects; project managers, with organizational support, must decide if agile methods will provide the most benefit over conventional software engineering methods for developing new software intensive projects.

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.

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 Agile (“Manifesto”) Software Methodology approach was developed in the early 90s to counter many of the shortcomings of Waterfall. According to the authors of the Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

There are many development methodologies for creating information systems. One of the more popular methods, developed in 1970 by Winston Royce, was the waterfall methodology. The waterfall methodology required that a team follow a prescribed sequence of five major steps when developing an information system. The project phases are linear and performed in a very methodical order starting with requirements analysis, then moving to design, followed by implementation, verification, and finally maintenance (see Exhibit A.). This methodology has been in place for many years but the highly structured methodology posed some major challenges. One major problem is when the business users dramatically change the requirements in later phases. This results in major rework and in some cases even project failures. With the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies, the systems development community needed a more flexible methodology as projects were under greater pressure to deliver systems faster. Then in 2001, a small team of technologists created an iterative agile development methodology which forced systems development efforts to be broken up into smaller manageable timeframes called “sprints”. These iterative sprints contain a set of manageable system components allowing the teams greater flexibility when producing software (see Exhibit B). According to the Agile for Dummies text, “Agile is an attempt to make the process of software development lean and effective, and it’s

When assessing the reason “the field is young”, one may surmise that newer developers may adopt more modern methodologies. Agile modeling came about after more traditional practices. However, less experienced developers may lean toward a more known and proven theory like the waterfall approach which uses successive phases to be completed and finalized. The waterfall is rigid but more predictable and may be easier to manage for new project managers. Using different types of techniques may confuse a

Agile methodologies provide businesses with a way to quickly react to changes in their environment. By delivering small portions of code over the course of a few weeks, developers can provide end-users with useable functionality on an ongoing basis as they move closer to the goal of providing the complete software. By being more reactive to changes, such as new requirements or changes in priority, agile allows development teams to be able to be more responsive and to provide customers with revised applications that are based on feedback that they have previously provided. Agile models, such as XP, are geared towards cost savings

Agile Methodology is an incremental, repetitious means of managing projects, particularly in the field of software development. These iterations, or sprints, give project managers many opportunities to evaluate and change the project during its lifecycle as well as keeping the end user informed and involved in development.

As the world keeps evolving day by day, technology has become an essential thing in our daily lives. Many tech-companies have been established due to huge expectation from people who are always enthusiastic about new inventions. However, not so many companies could survive in very competitive markets like PC computing, software, hardware, etc. In the early 1990s, as PC computing began to proliferate in the industry, software development faced a crisis. Expected estimated the time for a startup business to have a shippable application in production was about three years. This was even worse when it came to others area in the industry. For example, in aerospace and defense, the average time for a typical complex project could easily be more than 20 years. As a result, many projects ended up being cancelled in the middle of the development phase. Some were complete but did not meet all the business’s current needs. Conclusively, project management is the primary cause for those failures. Fortunately, the agile process management has been established from a small group of software leaders to solve the management issue. Agile is a set of development methods which promotes adaptive planning, early delivery. Not only that, it also encourages rapid and flexible responses to requirements changes at any phase of the development process. It is true to say that agile process has given companies, businesses a more sophisticated