Key Benefits of Agile Development Methodology and Testing

Today when business-cycles are getting faster and more dynamic, the only way businesses can survive is by turning more Agile. This is even more important for software firms. It’s because they have to deal with a market which is quick to embrace new innovations and also keeps changing quite rapidly. Of late, software firms experimenting with new agile development methodology have been able to reinvent their market niches much more effectively.

In agile development, cross-functional and self-organizing teams collaborate to evolve solutions for the requirements, by working towards a common goal. Each team needs to extract maximum advantage of a team-member’s strengths while allocating resources. From planning, scheduling to implementation and reevaluation, software firms have realized the key benefits of turning agile when it comes to their core processes of development and testing. Listed below are the benefits of Agile Development Methodology –

Accuracy

In agile development, the highest emphasis is given on creating the product that the customer always wanted. Being rigid, traditional methods sometimes delivered end-products that customer never intended for. On the other hand agile development quickly embraces the emerging and evolving changes in requirements to build the right product, making it much more accurate.

Budget Adherence

In agile development, irrespective of the evolving requirements, the time-scale is fixed. To make way for new changes, a similar amount of work has to be removed from the project. Unlike the traditional method, where lot of time is spent on deciding the scope of the projects, agile development allows the scope to vary, while keeping the deadlines constant. This enables development-teams to deliver products of acceptable quality, in time and also within the specified budget.

Flexibility

Agile is the byword for flexibility. Traditional agile development methodology resisted changes fearing for expenses and/or scope-creeps. Agile Development is designed to embrace changes, which are accepted as trade-offs for the existing requirements. This makes the process-flow more flexible and highly relevant.

Value-Addition

Agile development methodology focuses on creating features that address the essential needs of end-users. By letting the users define the attributes and scope, features are tailor-made to their suit their requirements.  This gives the developers an opportunity to evaluate their products through instant feedbacks. When end-users find the features more useful and usable, the product adds immense value to the client’s business.

Higher Engagement

Agile development allows for higher level of interaction among developers from final-product’s view point. Also, they get to understand user preferences more instantly. The fact that the product-features go live quickly, their efforts to build them are conspicuously visible in the end-product. This keeps them more enthusiastic and engaged.

While there are several benefits of agile development, a number of benefits of agile testing also exist, and here are few of them –

Easy Fixing of Defects

In the traditional method, small bugs are usually cascaded into complex ones as testers and developers work independently and have communication gaps. In agile testing, on the other hand, bugs can be fixed instantly. The immediate evaluation of the product by testers, working closely with developers in the same team makes this easy and effortless.

Robust End-Product

Unlike in traditional method in which testing is done at the fag-end of the project, agile testing happens concurrently with development. In traditional method, testing can be compromised owing to approaching deadlines, while no such option is possible with Agile Testing. This makes products developed through agile method more robust as they are thoroughly tested.

Timely-delivery

In agile method, testers working closely with developers do not allow for major changes to occur before the bugs reported by them are thoroughly fixed. It saves time as bugs do not get convoluted to become unfixable. This leads to quicker development and timely delivery of the product.

Key Takeaway

Agile development methodology and testing not just garners benefits for the teams building the product but also offers crucial benefits to the client’s business. It allows them to effectively deal with number of snags like scope-creeps, cost and product-frails, while reducing friction in communication and coordination during the process-flow.