Agile is about speed

The drivers for the increased use of agile include:

• Excessively long time-to-market for products and applications
• Inadequate customer orientation and regular interaction
• Over-engineered products—most of the features on a product or application may not be used
• High project failure rate
• ROI below expectations
• Inability to respond quickly to change
• Inadequate software quality

The key digital trends that have caused an increased use of agile include:

• More continuous integration fueled by digital transformation
• Complex integration using multichannel and omnipresent commerce, making it necessary to integrate multiple channels, devices, and wearable technology

In agile engagements, one knows the time and resources available and needs to estimate the features that can go into a release. Two popular modes of agile include:

• Scrum (prioritizes the highest value features and incremental delivery once every 2-4 weeks)
• Kanban (pinpoints bottlenecks to avoid hold-ups)

Agile engagements follow sprints and in each sprint (requirement, design, code, test) planning, the team selects the story points depending on various factors, including the availability of resources and user story complexity. All the members of the sprint team (cross-functional teams) are involved in this process (developers, business analysts, testers, configuration teams, build teams, the scrum master, and the production owner).

Once the user stories destined for the sprint are finalized, they are analyzed. Then, the developers work on the design while the testers write test cases and share these with business analysts for review. At the end of each sprint, the team discloses the user stories selected during the sprint to the product owner and gets a go or no go ruling. Once the demo is complete, the team gathers for the retrospective. Initially, agile meant co-location; today’s advanced tele-presence infrastructure makes it possible to work in distributed agile models and has removed the co-location dependency.