Custom Agile Development Process: Taking Agile Development Approach to a Whole New Level of Efficiency
Building a successful app involves challenges of different types. The great features and user-centric user experience cannot fulfill the criteria. The app should be released in time and developed with the right budget. Most importantly, the app project must remain within the designated project scope. So, the mobile app development process is more important than the so-called technical aspects.
While the agile development process is already well known for its speed, qualitative focus, and efficiency, you can further lower the risk of an agile development process and ensure a more predictable outcome. So, agile is better, but when agile is customized, it can just be the perfect process for your app project.
Are you pursuing unique app ideas for your next app project? Do you want to promise the development process as per your project requirements? Well, you may need a custom agile development process. So let us define and explain agile development first, followed by the custom agile development process and the critical value propositions.
What is the Agile Development Process, and how does it work?
The Agile development process encourages frequent iterations during app development, and it splits the entire development tasks into small sprints for faster completion and evaluation. This continuous testing alongside development guarantees better quality while ensuring faster development at the same time.
Agile Development involves a stringent feedback loop connecting the customers and the app developers to ensure optimum development speed, enhanced collaboration, and reactive development based on market dynamics. As a result, agile has boasted of the widely accepted standard in software development for leading companies for years.
Since predictability has always been a strength of the traditional waterfall development process, the agile process increasingly accommodates the key principles for enhanced predictability without losing its key strengths, such as continuous testing, faster development, and iterative development.
Over the years, four distinct ways of implementing agile processes have been established. Let’s have a look at them.
- Emphasis on individual users and user interactions instead of processes and tools.
- More importance to comprehensive documentation instead of only releasing a working solution.
- Allowing customer iterations and collaboration beyond the scope of the contract.
- Swiftly responding to changes instead of just adhering to a plan.
At the same time, these new areas of emphasis do not necessarily mean that you can ignore the documentation, tools, and preconceived plans with which you made a start. But alongside the importance of these attributes, there will always be more emphasis on the users, app prototypes, collaboration, and iteration during development in an agile development process.
Customizing the Agile Development Process
The basic promises and value propositions of agile are really good. But at the same time, the agile development process needs to have a rigorous creative focus, and it should be customized to fit the unique needs of each project and the developers. The more an agile process is tweaked to accommodate creativity and unique inputs, the better its quality. This is why customizing agile development is so important.
There is increased demand for customization in some countries where innovative startup app projects mostly embrace the agile approach. In Ireland, development companies often choose a middle path between traditional and agile processes. Dublin’s agile app development company catering to enterprise apps is more likely to stay tuned to customize an agile approach.
Agile development is all about flexible techniques and low-footprint development processes that allow a lot of flexibility even while the project needs to deal with a complicated multi-layered business model. So what are the most time-honored practices to customize an agile development process? Les briefly explain them.
Define the structure of communication in agile project
Is your app project following Scrum structure? If yes, you need to have a Scrum master to go ahead with the process. An experienced Scrum Master can provide the team with proper direction to ensure enhanced productivity.
Giving proper direction to the development team is particularly felt important when the team goes through frequent structural changes and finds it hard to settle for the tasks. It is important to ensure the relevance of the decisions to enforce them easily for the team. Whenever any decision is regarded as out of tune, lose no time to change the same.
According to many seasoned and experienced agile developers, the Scrum method can be further optimized to prevent wastage of time. When the development team finds the meeting at the end of a sprint unnecessary, you can postpone it and fix bi-weekly meetings. When meetings are not likely to add value, you need to change gears.
Squad-Based Development
Another effective approach to optimizing the agile method is to embrace squad-based development. The squads represent small teams taking care of cross-functional development tasks in a project. The squads generally have end-to-end responsibility for the entire app product. Now the development and delivery team can include several squads.
The squad members discuss with each other, plan, and make decisions on the best ways to carry out and complete the tasks designated for each sprint. We can cite many crucial advantages for this squad-based development approach.
The shared knowledge and project insights among the squad members are documented for maintenance and to help future development of the apps. Squad-based development ensures smooth and easy knowledge transfer, quick development cycles, process automation through proper alignment and predictable speed.
Thanks to the squad-based development approach, a project can easily do away with the risks of losing personnel and knowledge gained from the team members. Furthermore, since this approach presupposes that all members understand the entire project, transferring knowledge to a new team member becomes easier.
Planning at the spur of an event
Another crucial customization of agile processes is to allow planning and decisions at the spur of the event while always accommodating changes as per the demand of the development process. This ensures greater flexibility and adaptiveness to changes. This can be seen in reduced risks in terms of budget and the enhanced possibility to fulfill the project scope.
Known as rolling-wave planning, it helps agile projects make precise analyses, reach an understanding of the project, and act as per the knowledge and insights gained during development. This becomes easier when an app project delivers a demo every spring to allow quick review. In case after seeing this demo at the end of a sprint you decide to bring some changes to the app’s original planning, you can introduce these new changes in the following sprint. Since the project remains open to sudden changes in planning, this will not create any bottlenecks in the development process.
Conclusion
So, even the high-performance agile development process is not free from performance bottlenecks, and this is why the custom agile development approach has become the new in-thing. However, since agile is primarily focused on iterations, such customization will only help fulfill the agile approach’s original promises.
