Agile Development Services

Agile Process Benefits

Executed properly, an Agile development process accommodates initial product ideas and the inevitable new ideas that come up during development, to yield a feature-rich end product that performs well, and captures the vision, often with a body of next-version features and works well-defined for future phases (a solid backlog). The collaborative, review-as-you-go process is transparent and allows the client to plan releases, downstream events, and associated engagement economics, with authority and clarity.

We can, and do, run projects in more traditional ‘waterfall’ scenarios, where the features and requirements are already strictly defined, but prefer Agile work when appropriate.

Key Agile Principles

• The client appoints a product owner; this is someone who has the general vision for the product and who can coordinate client reviews and responses to interim deliverables;
• The development team works in defined intervals called Sprints; typically a sprint lasts two weeks. Sprints begin with the client product owner helping to define the priorities for the sprint, based on a backlog of desired features; the dev team then commits to certain deliverables and plans a demonstration at sprint-end;
• The dev team conducts daily stand-up meetings; these sessions serve to highlight any roadblocks or other issues threatening the sprint commitments;
• Client product owner analyzes new feature requests as they arise; we inevitably find that as the product starts to take shape, the client sees the need for new features they didn’t necessarily anticipate – this is a good thing, but we don’t chase shiny objects – the client product owner evaluates and prioritizes feature requests alongside existing ideas;
• Dev team releases interim versions sprint by sprint; the goal here is to release working versions of the new product as the team works its way through the feature list; there’s no waiting for demos until the end of the process; we release into a secure demo environment that the client product owner and others can use to evaluate progress.