Agile Transformation in IT-organizations - страница 2

Agile emerged as a mindset, a thought process that involves understanding, collaborating, learning, and staying flexible to achieve high-performing results, as a counterbalance to outdated approaches and excessive bureaucracy in IT field. Silicon Valley Residents realized that it is impossible to create innovative products in a conservative environment.

Here are Agile values with more detailed explanation.

There are four of them:

• if you want to build an agile process, you need to interact and communicate with each other. You can (and definitely will) use some tools, for example, trackers – JIRA, Redmine, etc. But the whole process should be based on various meetings and interaction, and not on tracker’s settings or TFS (Microsoft stack);

• the working product that we make is much more important than the documentation for it. An example was given above with two companies. Documentation, the user cannot apply because the product is not ready, does not bring value to this user. If we learn to work minimizing software development steps, or by making them smaller, then we will have a more flexible process;

• cooperation and interaction with the customer is more important than strict contract following. It is usually named Fixed Price when you sign an agreement and fulfill agreed amount of work. The time, amount of work and deadlines are fixed. This approach is not very good if you want to work for the long term and be flexible. To be agile, it is more correct to build partnerships with the customer. The most important thing is that the search for a partnership and a win-win situation begins here, when both the customer and his contractor win;

• readiness for changes with following the original plan. Agile development approach requires plan, estimates and forecasts. If you have an initial annual project plan and provide some working product version in some months or requirements change while developing you can change the whole plan taking changes and feedback into consideration.

12 Agile development principles, also the result of the Snowbird meeting, expand these several value-defining proposals.

It's all. Since then, the website with the Agile Manifesto has hardly changed (or maybe it hasn't changed at all), which can't be said about the world around Agile.

Agile methodologies have enjoyed overwhelming popularity: first mentioned in the PMBOK (the US Project Management Body of Knowledge standard) 5th edition (2013), then they were fully adopted in the PMBOK version 7, released in 2021 which took all the Agile principles and became its direct ambassador.

To conclude with Agile introduction, it is necessary to state the main goal of this approach – delivering value to the consumer. According to Agile methodology, it is achieved using three characteristics for a software product:

Thus, the Agile method is applied to:

• accelerate the product launch to the market. If you want to develop software faster, you need to apply Agile. For example, two similar business companies. The first one creates the technical task for software development, designs the structure and interface consistently, this is a waterfall model, implementing it can take several months. Another team can already release a website and software applying Agile, start earning money and hijack the market;