What is Agile? Why to use an Agile Software Development Team.

Buildable has compiled the main ideas of Agile software development as well as facts and statistics that demonstrate the effectiveness of Agile software development teams.

What is Agile?

Agile is a set of twelve principles that was written in 2001 by 17 developers. There are four key values for the Agile methodology.

1. Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
2. Value working software over comprehensive documentation.
3. Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
4. Value responding to change over following a plan.

Every Agile software development team adopts different techniques to support the Agile methodology throughout software product development. According to the State of Agile, the top five most used Agile techniques are:

1. Daily Standup – A daily standup is something Buildable development teams do religiously. Every morning, the office and Teams-chats are buzzing as each project team gets together to check the pulse of their projects. Our standups include what we’re working on today, what we’ve completed if we need the team’s help to find a solution, and if we learned something new.

2. Retrospectives – At Buildable, our retrospectives happen at the end of each 2-4-week sprint. We find our process, teamwork, effectiveness, and engineering all progressively improve with each retrospective. We discuss engineering and architecture decisions that are working well. Senior and junior engineers learn from each other and all improve their craft.

3. Sprint/Iteration Planning – This technique is on the “most-used” list every year and may never be dethroned. Sprints are 2-4-week, mini development cycles where software development teams complete a pre-determined set of tasks or software functions from design to deployment. Sprints allow Agile developers to deliver working software frequently and product owners to approve and/or pivot to continue building their perfect software solution.

4. Kanban – There’s a chance you’ve seen this before and just didn’t know its name. Kanban is the technique of moving small tasks from to-do to complete, through a series of swim lanes that often include in-progress and review – you know, the old post-it note board. Today there are many great digital tools for Kanban and Agile software development teams. They include Jira, Monday, and Wrike to name a few. Buildable uses Gitlab for our Kanban task and user story planning.

5. Dedicated Product Owner – This could be you they're talking about. One of the most-used techniques of Agile is including you – the customer, client, or project champion. Collaboration in the software development process is essential to bringing your vision to life. Buildable’s Agile development teams meet weekly (or more often) to ensure everything is on track or better. 

Why would I want an Agile software development team?

We’ve compiled a few key statistics from industry-leading sources to demonstrate many of the top reasons software development teams choose to adopt Agile methodologies.

Reasons for Adopting Agile (Source: State of Agile)

Two-thirds of Agile development teams improved their ability to manage distributed teams. Agile development projects have success rates 1.5x higher than those of waterfall projects. (Standish Group Chaos) 98% of Agile development teams say Agile has helped their company.(State of Agile) 74% of Agile adopters strengthened their engineering discipline.(intertech) For these reasons, 80% of federal IT projects adopt Agile.(Target Process)

Do you have more questions about how Agile works? Connect with us today to learn more.