Power of Agile Methodologies in Project Management

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Agile methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle of a project.

Exploring the Traditional Approach to Project Management

The traditional method of project management, often referred to as the “Waterfall” model, is a sequential approach where the project is divided into distinct, linear stages, and each stage depends on the delivery of the previous one. This method is highly structured and typically follows these phases:

Requirements Gathering: All possible requirements of the project are documented and clearly defined before the start of the actual development process. Changes to requirements after this phase are not easily accommodated.
Design: Based on the requirements gathered, a design phase outlines how the software will be structured. This includes both high-level system architecture and detailed design.
Implementation: During this phase, the actual code is written based on the defined requirements and design documents.
Verification: This phase involves testing the system to ensure it meets all the defined requirements and doesn’t contain bugs. Testing typically cannot begin until the product is fully developed.
Maintenance: After the product is deployed, any necessary updates, corrections, and changes are managed during maintenance.

The Waterfall model is characterized by several key features

Predictability: Since the full scope of the work is known upfront and the process follows a predetermined set of phases, the project timeline and budget can be estimated more accurately at the beginning.
Documentation: There is a strong emphasis on documentation at each stage of development, which creates a comprehensive record of the project’s progress and can be useful for onboarding new team members or for maintaining the system later.
Structure: Each phase has specific deliverables and a review process, making it easy to understand what is completed and what is next.

Limitations of water fall model

Inflexibility: Changes to scope or requirements after the project starts are difficult and costly to implement, as they often require revisiting and revising previous work.
Delayed Testing: Testing only occurs after the completion of the implementation phase, which can lead to the discovery of major issues late in the project, impacting timelines and budgets.
Risk and Uncertainty: If there is a misunderstanding of the initial requirements, it might only be discovered after the product is tested or deployed, which can lead to increased costs and project failure.
Delayed Delivery: The product is only released after the final phase is completed, which means that stakeholders have to wait until the end of the project to see any tangible results.
The traditional Waterfall approach works well for projects where requirements are clear from the beginning and unlikely to change, such as in construction or manufacturing industries, but may be less suitable for projects that are more dynamic and require frequent changes, like in software development.

Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto states that −Wewee uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. All Agile frameworks are informed by the 2001-published Manifesto for Agile Software Development and follow its 12 Principles butbut theyso differ from each other in ways that can make one the preferred approach for a particular organisation or development project.

Agile software development emphasizes on four core values

Individual and team interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Agile principles

Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months).
Working software is the principal measure of progress.
Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
Close, daily co-operation between businesspeople and developers.
Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location).
Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design.
Simplicity.
Self-organizing teams.
Regular alteration to changing situations.

Characteristics of Agility

Agility in Agile Software Development focuses on the culture of the whole team with multi-discipline, cross-functional teams that are empowered and self-organizing.
It fosters shared responsibility and accountability.
Facilitates effective communication and continuous collaboration.
The whole-team approach avoids delays and wait times.
Frequent and continuous deliveries ensure quick feedback that in in turn enable the team to align to the requirements.
Collaboration facilitates combining different perspectives timely in implementation, defect fixes and accommodating changes.
Progress is constant, sustainable, and predictable emphasizing transparency

The Agile frameworks

There is over 50 formally detailed Agile frameworks but a large majority of software development teams and projects use one of the several most established. These include:

Scrum
Kanban
Extreme Programming (XP)
Feature-Driven Development (FDD)
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
Adaptive Software Development (ASD)
Rapid Application Development (RAD)
Crystal
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

SCRUM

Scrum is an agile framework for managing worwork,th an emphasis on software development. Scrum believes in empowering the development team and advocates working in small teams (saysay,to 9 members).It consists of three roles, and their responsibilities are explained as follows:

Scrum Master is responsible for setting up the team, sprint meeting and removing obstacles to progress.
Product owner creates product backlog, prioritizes the backlog and is responsible for the delivery of functionality at each iteration
Scrum Team manages its own work and organizes the work to complete the sprint or cycle

A backlog is a central element of the scrum framework and serves as a document that evolves throughout the project’s life cycle. There are mainly two backlogs in scrum: the product backlog and sprint backlog.

Product Backlog

This is a repository where requirements are tracked, with details on the number of requirements to be completed for each release.
It should be maintained and prioritized by the product owner, and it should be distributed to the scrum team.
team can also request for a new requirement addition, modification or deletion.

Sprint Backlog

Sprint backlog is a subset of product backlog and includes the work items that the development team commits to completing during a specific sprint, which is a time-boxed iteration in scrum that is mostly 2-4 weeks in duration.

Key characteristics of a backlog include:

Prioritized: The most important items that deliver the most value to the customer are at the top. This helps ensure that the team always works on the most critical tasks first.
Detailed Appropriately: Items at the top of the backlog are well-defined and clear, so everyone understands what needs to be done. Items further down the backlog can be less detailed and get refined as they move up.
Estimable: Each backlog item should have enough information that the team can estimate how much effort is required to complete it. This helps in planning and resource allocation.
Small Enough to Execute: Work items should be small enough that they can be completed within a sprint, facilitating quick wins and continuous progress.
Adaptive: The backlog is regularly updated and revised based on feedback and changes in business needs or market conditions. This flexibility ensures the product evolves in the most valuable direction.
Transparent: Everyone involved in the project should have access to the backlog for full visibility on what’s coming up and what’s been completed. This transparency promotes trust and better collaboration.
Measurable: Each item should have criteria that clearly state how success is measured, ensuring the team knows exactly when the item is completed to the required standard.

Scrum Practices

Process flow of Scrum Methodologies:

Each iteration of a scrum is known as Sprint
product backlog is a list where all details are entered to get end product
During each Sprint, top items of Product backlog are selected and turned into Sprint backlog
team works on the defined sprint backlog
Team checks for the daily work
At the end of the sprint, team delivers product functionality and works sustainably Use test-driven and test-first development.

Kanban

Kanban is a popular Agile methodology that originated from the Japanese manufacturing sector at Toyota. It is designed to manage work by balancing demands with available capacity and improving the handling of bottlenecks. In the context of Agile software development and project management, Kanban helps teams visualize their workflow, maximize efficiency, and continuously improve their processes.

Kanban is based on four core principles:

Visualize Work: Using a Kanban board, all tasks are visually mapped out for every team member to see. This transparency helps with understanding workflow stages and current work in progress.
Limit Work in Progress (WIP): By limiting how many items can be in any given stage at one time, teams can focus better and finish tasks faster, which helps to avoid overloading team members and ensures smooth flow of work.
Manage Flow: The goal is to improve the time it takes for work to move through the entire process. By monitoring and optimizing the flow, teams can identify bottlenecks and address them to improve speed and efficiency.
Continuous Improvement (Kaizen): Kanban encourages regular reviews and adaptations of processes to improve speed, quality, and team engagement.

Kanban Board

The visual centrepiece of Kanban is the Kanban board. It’s a physical or digital board divided into columns that represent different stages of the workflow. Common columns include:

To Do: Tasks that need to be started.
In Progress: Tasks currently being worked on.
Testing: Tasks undergoing testing.
Done: Completed tasks

Each task or work item is represented by a card that moves from left to right as it progresses through these stages. The board provides a real-time overview of the current work state, available capacity, and any bottlenecks.

Benefits of Kanban

Flexibility: Kanban does not require the fixed-length sprints typical in Scrum, so it can adapt to changing priorities more fluidly.
Increased Efficiency: Limiting work in progress helps reduce multitasking and context switching, which can significantly boost individual and team productivity.
Improved Delivery Flow: By focusing on the completion of tasks, Kanban can reduce the time it takes for work to be completed and delivered.
Enhanced Visibility: The visual nature of the Kanban board allows everyone on the team and even external stakeholders to understand the workflow and status at a glance.

Extreme Programming (XP)

This is one of the Agile software development methodologies. It provides values and principles to guide the team behaviour. The team is expected to self-organize. It involves:

Emphasis on continuous feedback from the customer
Short iterations
Design and redesign
Coding and testing frequently
Eliminating defects early, thus reducing costs
Keeping the customer involved throughout the development
Delivering working product to the customer

Extreme Programming takes the effective principles and practices to extreme levels.

Code reviews are effective as the code is reviewed all the time.
Testing is effective as there is continuous regression and testing.
Design is effective as everybody needs to do refactoring daily.
Integration testing is important as integrate and test several times a day.
Short iterations are effective as the planning game for
Release planning and iteration planning.

XP Roles

Customer: He decides what the project needs to do. And provides the user stories.
Programmer: Defines the architecture & writes the code.
Implements the user stories & unit testing
Tracker: Monitor the team member’s progress
Coach: Helps the team work effectively, self-organise, and use good XP practices
Tester: Runs functional tests, acceptance test.
Administrator: Set up and maintains the team members
Computers, network, and development tools.

Extreme values and principles

Communication -between team members and with the users
Simplicity -The methodology favours simple designs
Feedback – feedback can work in different ways- testing, reviews, etc
Courage – Solve the problem for today not for tomorrow
Respect -communication between different stakeholders as well

Feature Driven Development (FDD)

Feature‐Driven Development (FDD) is another iterative and incremental development model. FDD was created to work with large teams. This method is focused around “designing & building” features.

FDD Roles – Primary roles

Project manager – This is the project’s administrative leader. The project manager tracks the project’s progress, budget, and other resources.
Chief architect – This person is responsible for the project’s overall programmatic design. The chief architect doesn’t write the design but instead helps the team come up with a design cooperatively.
Development manager – This person manages day‐to‐day development activities. The development manager resolves conflicts, makes sure the development teams have the resources they need, etc
Chief programmers – These are experienced developers who are familiar with all the functions of development (design, analysis, coding, and so on). They lead teams of programmers who work on a set of assigned programming tasks.
Class owner – In many agile models, the code is jointly owned by the entire development team, so any member can modify anyone else’s code. In contrast, FDD assigns ownership of each class to a specific developer.
Domain expert – These are customers, users, executive champions, and others who know about the project domain and how the finished application should work. They are the source of information for the developers. They are sometimes called Subject Matter Experts (SME s).

FDD Phases: FDD projects move through five phases. The first 3occur at the start of the project and the last 2 phases are repeated iteratively until the application is complete.

The 5 FDD phases are

Develop a Model: The team builds an object model for the application
Build a Feature List: To build a list of the features that make up the application. FDD technically defines a feature as an action/result/object triple where the action generates the result related to the object. Eg: a feature might be “calculate the customer’s outstanding balance. “Here the is “calculate,” the result is “outstanding balance,” and the object is “the customer.”
Plan by Feature: The planning team prioritizes the features and builds an initial schedule.
Design by Feature: A design package is produced for each feature. A chief programmer selects a small group of features that are to be developed within two weeks. Finally, a design inspection is held.
Build by Feature: To produce a feature is planned, the class owners develop code for their classes. After unit testing and successful code inspection, the completed feature is promoted to the main build.

FDD Milestones

To keep track of everything that’s going on during an iteration, FDD defines 6 milestones. The first three milestones are completed during the Design by Feature activity, and the last three are completed during the Build by Feature activity.

The key idea behind agile is to embrace change, foster collaboration, and deliver value incrementally while continuously adapting and improving based on feedback and changing circumstances. When this approach is applied to project development, it enables teams to enjoy a more adaptable, cooperative, and responsive planning experience, resulting in a personalized and successful outcome tailored to their changing needs and objectives. We Nuventure Connect Employs Agile development methodologies to successfully deliver innovative projects, ensuring flexibility, rapid iteration, and exceptional results. As one of the best IT staff augmentation companies, our dedication is to promoting creative and efficient mobile app development by utilizing the most recent technological developments and Agile methodologies. This approach ensures that we consistently deliver innovative projects successfully. Hire the best mobile development team through our portal or book a call for further enquiries.