The Art of Agile Development

Enter Agility

Will agile development help you be more successful? It might. Agile development focuses on achieving personal, technical, and organizational successes. If you’re having trouble with any of these areas, agile development might help.

Organizational Success

Agile methods achieve organizational successes by focusing on delivering value and decreasing costs. This directly translates to increased return on investment. Agile methods also set expectations early in the project, so if your project won’t be an organizational success, you’ll find out early enough to cancel it before your organization has spent much money.

Specifically, agile teams increase value by including business experts and by focusing development efforts on the core value that the project provides for the organization. Agile projects release their most valuable features first and release new versions frequently, which dramatically increases value. When business needs change or when new information is discovered, agile teams change direction to match. In fact, an experienced agile team will actually seek out unexpected opportunities to improve its plans.

Agile teams decrease costs as well. They do this partly by technical excellence; the best agile projects generate only a few bugs per month. They also eliminate waste by cancelling bad projects early and replacing expensive development practices with simpler ones. Agile teams communicate quickly and accurately, and they make progress even when key individuals ...