Managing a team is not a piece of cake for modern businesses. Focusing on your work while hopping from daily scrum to the next proposed sprint is difficult. Things can anytime go out of control if you don’t have the perfect scrum tools in your hand.
In a rapidly changing business landscape, it’s more important than ever to adapt quickly to new challenges. That’s where agile software development comes in. This methodology prioritizes flexibility and collaboration, allowing businesses to respond quickly to change.
According to recent survey data collected by AgileBits, more than 50% of businesses that employ more than 100 people use agile methods. Hence, businesses of all sizes realize the benefits of agile software development, becoming an industry-standard in the modern business world.
We hope that this blog will make it easy for you to decide and select the best software development methodology for your next project.
But, before we start this journey, it would be wise to have a look at “what is Agile”?
Agile Software Development: A Brief
If we go to the literal meaning of the word “Agile,” then it means — “able to move quickly and easily.” So, the same meaning goes here when we talk about agile regarding software development or project management.
Agile is a project management methodology primarily used by a custom software development company. It divides the whole task into multiple smaller tasks and combines them with the incremental & short phases of work called sprints.
The main reason behind this approach is early and fast delivery, adaptive planning & frequent reassessment, flexible response to change, and continuous improvement.
According to Hygger, “agile projects are 28.0% more successful than traditional projects. Almost 86.0% of 101,5 international software developers use Agile in their work. 71.0% of surveyed companies admitted to using Agile approaches sometimes or always.
Now, I think you have got an idea of Agile, let’s move further.
Also Read: Agile Vs Waterfall: Which Software Methodology is Right for your Business?
Why Do Modern Businesses Need Agile Software Development?
Agile software development is here to stay. It is becoming increasingly popular as more businesses realize this approach’s benefits. In today’s fast-paced business world, agility is key. It provides organizations with thethe flexibility and adaptability to compete.
The traditional waterfall approach to software development can often be too slow and inflexible for modern businesses. Agile development teams can work in short sprints to deliver software responsive to changes. This helps businesses avoid the costly and time-consuming process of making major changes to software that has already been developed.
Agile development also encourages collaboration between different teams, which helps ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal. By using agile development, businesses can be more efficient and productive and better compete in today’s market.
How Does It Work For Seamless Software Development?
Agile methodology helps teams to deliver software development projects more seamlessly. Breaking down the project into smaller pieces allows for flexible and easier project management.
The Agile process is typically divided into four distinct steps:
1. Planning and requirements gathering
It is the first step in the process and involves understanding what the customer wants from the project. This step is essential in ensuring that the final product meets the customer’s needs.
2. Development
It is the second step in the process and involves coding the software according to the specifications gathered in the first step. This step is essential in ensuring that the software functions correctly.
3. Testing
It is the third step in the process and involves testing the software to ensure that it meets the specifications gathered in the first step. This step is vital in ensuring that the software is high quality and meets customer needs.
4. Deployment
It is the fourth and final step in the process and involves putting the software into production. This step is important in ensuring that the software is available to the customer.
By following these four steps, Agile methodology helps teams to deliver software development projects more seamlessly.
Top 9 Advantages Of Agile Software Development For Modern Businesses
Agile software development has many advantages for modern businesses. It helps businesses respond quickly to market changes, save money by reducing the need for rework, improve customer satisfaction levels, and improve their competitiveness.
Empowers Employees
Teams are empowered to decide how their work will be accomplished, their tools, and who their customers are. Employees feel a sense of ownership over the product and know they can make changes if needed. Plus, because teams are self-organizing, employees learn new skills and gain experience in areas outside their expertise.
Builds Trust with Customers
Agile software development ensures that the customer is not forgotten and their needs are considered throughout. As a result, customers trust your company and will be more likely to use your IT consulting services or buy your product because they’re confident it will be delivered on time with all of their needs met.
1) Ensures customer will have input throughout the process
2) The customer trusts a business more if they know they will be given what was promised
3) Helps create a stronger bond between customers and businesses
4) Building trust leads to increased sales
5) Better relationships with suppliers
6) Improved performance
7) Better performance creates an incentive for future success
8 ) Successful companies attract investment
9 ) Investment creates opportunities for expansion
Increased flexibility
Agile development teams can adapt their plans and processes to accommodate changes in scope or requirements. This makes agile development ideal for fast-paced, ever-changing business environments.
Promotes Continuous Learning
Agile software development is a collaborative process. There will be disagreements and arguments between team members. The key to agile software development is that it helps teams resolve disagreements quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, the best idea wins because all team members are equally invested.
Better Communication Leads
Communication is key when it comes to software development. A team that communicates well will work more efficiently and effectively. With agile methodology, regular meetings and standups help with this communication. Regular testing also helps identify bugs in the software before they become a major problem.
Not only does this save time and money, but it improves overall customer satisfaction by providing better quality assurance. Other advantages include faster feedback loops, better management of risk, and improved ability to respond to change.
Greater efficiency
Agile development teams are typically more efficient than traditional waterfall teams since they can deliver working software incrementally and get feedback from users early and often.
Enhanced transparency
Agile development teams are more open and transparent than traditional teams, making it easier for stakeholders to see the project’s progress and offer feedback.
Increased stakeholder engagement
Agile development teams typically involve stakeholders more often and at a deeper level than traditional teams, which leads to greater buy-in and ownership of the final product.
Faster time to market
Agile teams can quickly adapt to changes and deliver working solutions incrementally, which means agile projects can get to market faster than traditional waterfall projects.
Lower risk
Agile teams deliver working software early and often, reducing the project’s overall risk. Additionally, agile teams are typically more responsive to changes, reducing risk.
Encourages Feedback from All Roles
The collaborative nature of agile software development ensures that feedback from all roles is encouraged and welcomed, which leads to better decisions. Feedback can come in many forms, including through informal conversations with team members or formal meetings, but the key is that it’s encouraged constructively.
One way to encourage feedback is by setting up regular retrospectives where team members discuss what went well and what didn’t go so well in their work. And, because agile software development typically involves shorter projects, feedback loops are often tighter than they would be with waterfall-style processes.
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Some Popular Agile Development Tools
JIRA
JIRA is a light web-based agile tool for Bug tracking and management. It offers a plethora of great plugins that can push your agile software development a little higher. It provides highly advanced reporting features, including burnout charts, flow diagrams, and sprint reports to present the overall progress.
Jira Software was launched in 2002 as an issue tracking and project management tool for agile software development teams. Since then, more than 65,000 companies across the globe have adopted Jira for its flexibility to support various types of projects and its extensibility to work with millions of apps and integrations.
Benefits of using JIRA
- Customized scrum boards to visualize tasks
- Powerful filtering and quality search
- Smooth source and issue integration
- Early bugs detection and defect management
Pinterest, Reddit, Medium, Twitter, and Lyft are some big companies using JIRA tools.
Active collab
ActiveCollab is an integrated agile software development tool that combines time tracking, task management, and billing into one easy-to-use app. The solution will help you organize your tasks, projects, and files in one specific palace so that your teams can be on the same page immediately.
Over a decade, over 50,000 teams have successfully delivered projects with ActiveCollab.
Benefits of using ActiveCollab-
- Track tasks, time, progress, and speed.
- It is flexible and helps users daily.
- It is convenient, efficient performance, and secure.
- Dell, Real World Marketing, Ecstatic, and Strategic DigitalLab Pte Ltd. are some companies using the ActiveCollab tool.
ProjectManager
ProjectManager is an award-winning and best project management tool used by big brands, such as Ralph Lauren and NASA. It’s not a pure-bred agile tool, but it provides a couple of flexible benefits that an agile team could enjoy anytime. It lets you smoothly switch between two different views. It is a wonderful tool for teams deploying agile principles to hybrid methodology.
Within just 12 months of ProjectManager, NASA and the United Nations were using its service, and now over 20,000 managers and software development teams in 101 countries are using it daily. Microsoft Office, Google apps, Salesforce, Slack, and DropBox, are some business apps integrated with it.
You can set up customized reports in addition to the pre-set data on timesheets, expenses, workloads, and team availability.
Benefits of ProjectManager tool-
- Toggle between task list, kanban board views, and Gantt Chart easily
- Google apps, such as Calendar, Gmail, and Drive, are integrated
- Microsoft Office and Microsoft word can be used
- For other integration, Zapier is available
Volvo, Bank of America, United States Post Office, and the University of Washington are some big brands using the Project Manager agile software development tool.
Monday.com
Monday.com is an agile tool leveraged by a custom software development company as it offers a flexible structure that can easily be configured to match with agile teams and hybrid methodologies. It is a great choice for those who want a simple and unobstructed focus on the project.
Its integrations include Gmail, Slack, Google Drive, Google Calendar, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Jira, and Typeform, accessible via Zapier.
According to a Linkedin report, “over 100,000 companies across the globe are using monday.com to push their teams to move faster and let them focus on the more important work”.
Benefits of Monday.com-
- Customized task boards for managing assignee, task status, and due dates.
- Collect data from various boards to check the work in progress
- Smooth communication, such as hashtags, comments, mentions, and file sharing features
- An easy-to-learn tool with a significant emphasis on customer services.
- STAC, Wine advisor, Studyplus, Capabilia, and Bunch are some companies using Monday.com.
Trello
Trello is a popular app for managing and prioritizing projects and tasks. It includes boards, cards, and lists that help you to collaborate easily and get more work done in less time. Due to the easy and visual treats it provides to users, it is widely adopted by leading start-ups across the globe and many Fortune 500 companies.
In 2017, Trello was acquired as the top IT consulting services company by Atlassian (famous for creating BitBucket and Jira) and scored 25 million signups. In other words, Trello increased its user base by 426% in 3 years, from 2017–2020.
Benefits of using Trello –
- Add comments and attach files directly to Trello cards
- Power up your workflow to cater to your business needs
- Stays in sync across all of the devices
- Simple and iIntuitive
Udemy, Typeform, Craft base, Stack share, and medium.com are some companies using the Trello agile software development tool.
Basecamp
It is one of the best project management tools you use in your browser and on your mobile. It offers the tools you may require to set up schedules or to-dos, create and upload files and documents, message and chat with your colleagues, and keep regular with your teams.
Benefits of using the Backlog project management tool-
- Elegant and simple tool to use
- Allows collaborative project management
- Easy integration with third-party tools for synchronization and backup.
- Some companies using backlog agile software development tools are great for students, freelancers, and personal projects
Atware, Softbank, Temona, Weblio, and Kiwi Universe.
ProofHub
If you are looking for an agile tool that can work from scratch and help remote teams or agile teams, then nothing is better than ProofHub. It backs you to plan, organize, collaborate, and deliver agile projects without delving into advanced technologies and much effort. You can easily create documents, share ideas, and begin discussions with this software.
ProofHub is the most highly rated project management tool today. It is one of the leading tools as it gives all the features at a great price for unlimited users.
Benefits of ProofHub-
- Give a clear picture of “how projects are running.”
- Use for both android and iOs users
- Simplify your work by defining the tasks flow
- Keep track of time spent on each task
- Visual timelines for projects for better planning and resource management
CulturalVistas, Velux America, Dialpad, and Lieberman Research Worldwide are some companies using Proofhub.
Cacoo
One of the simplest and easy-to-use online diagramming agile tools for organizing, planning, and optimizing your business ideas. With a real-time collaborative editing feature and a plethora of templates and shapes ready to deploy, you can create highly professional diagrams in the blink of an eye.
More than 2.0 million users depend on Cacoo for creating professional flowcharts, Venn diagrams, wireframes, and mind maps.
Benefits of Cacoo-
- Automatically track version history so that you can easily revert changes
- Extensive library of advanced shapes and templates
- On-diagram comments and place for contextual feedback
- The real-time collaborative editing feature lets you see who’s editing
- Offer a platform to work side by side with your team irrespective of their location
Slack, Confluence, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box are some popular applications that integrate with Cacoo.
Axosoft
It is a proprietary project management and bug tracking system for on-premise or hosted software. Software developers and project managers can easily see each other’s tasks, defects, incidents, and requirements in the system in person by filling cards through the scrum planning board.
It operates as a web application and possesses the capabilities to integrate with TortoiseSVN and Microsoft Visual Studio.
Benefits of Axosoft
- From efficient planning to visual tracking of the progress of the task
- Examine the capacity of your team, sprint, and team members
- Edit and customize item cards, augment work logs, and watch in-progress limits.
- Customized dashboards offer a concise overview of your projected ship dates, velocity, and other significant details.
Vantages production, Three river systems, Footwork solutions, and Sonora software are some of the brands using Axosoft tools.
Kanban Tool
Kanban tool is developed to “improve team performance with a visual presentation tool.” It can be used as an online Kanban board for organizations with seamless time-tracking. It has separate windows for QA teams, devs, and marketing teams, and it also provides different types of boars per your workflow.
Zapier, Google Drive, SkyDrive, WeWiredWeb, DropBox, and Box are some of the integrations of Kanban tools.
Benefits of the Kanban tool-
- Set up board permission when creating a board.
- Customized fields so you can decide what to include or not in the default card.
- Very easy to plan individual tasks with this tool.
- Send messages to selected people or email notifications for task comments and assignments.
Orsay, Siemens, Cisco, City Index, and Skyscanner are some big organizations using agile software development tools.
The Future of Agile Software Development
Agile software development has revolutionized how we think about and build software applications. In just a few short years, agile has gone from being a niche methodology to being adopted by organizations of all sizes across the globe.
Many experts believe that agile will continue to grow in popularity as more and more organizations come to realize the benefits that it can offer. It is predicted that agile will eventually become the standard way of developing software applications.
Some believe that agile will evolve and change over time as new challenges and opportunities arise. As agile methodology continues to evolve, we can expect to see new tools and techniques being developed to help agile teams work more effectively.
Whatever the future holds for agile development, one thing is certain — it is here to stay and will only get bigger and better.
Conclusion
While agile software development is often seen as a tool for tech startups and developers, it has many benefits that businesses of all sizes can leverage. Agile offers scalability, flexibility, and an efficient workflow to help your team get products to market faster.
If you’re still on the fence about agile software development, hopefully, this article has given you some food for thought. The nine advantages of agile listed here are just the tip of the iceberg — there are many more benefits when your business adopts an agile way of working.
Agile Software Development By ValueCoders
ValueCoders’ software development teams follow agile development methodology and deliver excellence through their high-quality products. We have been a leading and best software development company in India since 2004, serving 2400+ clients all over the globe.
Our team of experts can help make the transition as smooth and stress-free as possible. We also allow our clients to be involved in the development process, so they can see the project’s progress and provide feedback along the way.
The benefits of our agile software development include:
- Faster turnaround times
- Higher quality software
- More customer satisfaction
- Increased flexibility and collaboration
- Expert software consulting services
Ready to take your business to new heights? Hire software developers from us or contact us today, and let us show you how agility can change everything.
