Random thoughts on Agile Development

It has been quite some time that I blogged and since I didn’t have anything interesting to do today so thought of reviving this blog..Yes you got it right, I’ve been thinking of being a regular but for some reason (joy of being idle) I never did so. Update about me, I joined a new organization as a Business Analyst. This organization is into Agile consulting and software delivery projects and I’ve been assigned to one of their bigger accounts. Being new to Agile my initial reaction to Agile was duh…. what’s the difference? But I think I’m starting to like Agile. I will give a shot at my understanding of Agile and also try to explain the buzzwords. Agile: It’s mostly same as waterfall model with the exception being that agile has shorter rather much shorter delivery cycles compared to waterfall model. The working software could be released as soon a week; typically an entire cycle of requirement gathering, analysis, design, development, testing and signoff called as a Sprint (OR Iteration) and a sprint is of 2-3 weeks. The customer gets to see the product early and gets exactly what he wants (in most of the cases). There is a focus on business value, things which are higher business value is generally done first. This ensures that the most critical feature in terms of business value is out early for the customers to reap benefits. Some concepts worth spending some time are analysis technique, estimation, project management tool, etc. I will write in details on those topics in my next blogs.

Agile believes in the concept of self motivated team which is sincere and pick up the work which is left and update the status however on the flip side it’s difficult to find such people and Agile may not work for organization with hierarchical orgs.