AGILE OVERVIEW

Languages and Design

In the late 1990′s several methodologies began to get increasing public attention. Each had a different combination of old ideas, new ideas, and transmuted old ideas. But they all emphasized close collaboration between the programmer team and business experts; face-to-face communication (as more efficient than written documentation); frequent delivery of new deployable business value; tight, self-organizing teams; and ways to craft the code and the team such that the inevitable requirements churn was not a crisis.
www.agilealliance.org

“Agile is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams with “just enough” ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders.”
www.agilemodeling.com

What is Agile Software Development?

Agile is a very easy concept to understand and adopt. Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, said it best: “My definition of Agile is that you accept input from reality and respond to it”
Kent Beck

In today’s world the successful and on-time delivery of development projects is the key to business survival and Agile is a philosophy or “lifestyle” which focuses on the delivery of business value from IT as well as enable a collaborative and cooperative approach between all stakeholders.

At Kaizania, we subscribe and live out to the “Agile Manifesto” when approaching any project:

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

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Part of the Agile philosophy are numerous frameworks, tools and techniques to employ within your business. Some focus on the business and management of projects, and others on enhancing the Agility of your IT and development teams from a technical point of view. However, one common thread through all frameworks, tools and techniques is the application of the Agile principles:

• Active user/customer involvement is imperative
• The team must be empowered to make decisions
• Requirements evolve, but the timescale is fixed
• Capture requirements at a high level; lightweight & visual
• Develop small, incremental releases and iterate
• Focus on frequent delivery of products
• Complete each feature before moving on to the next
• Apply the 80/20 rule
• Testing is integrated throughout the project lifecycle test early and often
• A collaborative & cooperative approach between all stakeholders is essential

For more information on Agile and Scrum services at Kaizania, please contact Vaughn du Preez,
info@agileacademy.co.za or phone directly on +27 12 809 4462 or Cell: 082 332 3878.