Agile can create and respond to changes to make a profit in a fast-moving business environment. Its agility comes from balancing flexibility and stability. In today's competitive environment, where technology is moving fast (which results in a high probability of changes and customer demand), agile is the answer to coping with the situation and gaining a competitive edge.
Nowadays, all successful organizations are customer driven. They take frequent feedback from end users on their products and use that feedback to expand their user base. Agile helps gather results from the development team to continuously adapt feedback into software releases, and most of the time everything has a high priority. To deal with this situation, you need agile.
Executive management provides funding and looks for transparency. They demand productive output to increase ROI, and you want to win their confidence by showing incremental development of the product. To create transparency for a project and keep track of its budget and delivery timeline, you need agile.
When you continuously want to engage your stakeholders by showing them a demonstration of the product, and when development and testing are part of the same cycle, you need Agile.
In the preceding scenarios, you looked at various situations where the Agile methodology is required to keep the organization ahead with robust delivery and customer feedback.
Agile is able to quickly move in a time box manner, which means you time box activities in a short cycle and take an iterative approach for product development instead of working on the entire product to develop and deliver it at once. The Agile methodology advocates seeking continuous feedback by keeping customers and stakeholders engaged closely, involving them in every phase of product development, adapting feedback into requirements, evaluating market trends, and working with them to prioritize the stakeholders. Then, the development team take up the prioritized requirements, conduct technical analyses, design, develop, test, and deliver.
Everyone works as one team toward one goal and breaks the silo mindset. Agile thinking helps the technical team understand the requirements from the customer's perspective and respond to changes quickly and efficiently. This is the reason why most companies want to go agile. The Agile methodology is fast and easy to adopt using many tools that are available on the market, such as JIRA, VersionOne, and Rally. You may face some initial challenges while developing agile thinking, but the benefits are very high compared to the challenges that every organization faces when moving toward adopting the Agile methodology.
