Why Is Agile Important? Adopting Agile Practices In Challenging Times
What happens if a tried and true, seasoned strategy confronts a crisis? The chances it will remain effective in the rapidly changing environment plummet with every update about the market. There are different ways to face the situation: wait quietly until it stabilizes or adjust to the circumstances. The latter option seems to be the most reasonable, and adopting an agile workflow helps to do it.
What Is an Agile Team?
Let’s start with a quick reminder. An agile team is a small, multidisciplinary, and independent group focused on high-quality results. The agile approach makes product development quick and flexible through an iterative incremental model that involves less bureaucracy and simplified hierarchy. It takes one to four weeks to implement changes — fast enough to understand whether new features are still relevant.
Chaos vs Control
Agile doesn’t equal anarchy. Flexibility and subtle control still require documentation, though a development team doesn’t have to wait for finalized requirements. It is normal for agile documentation writing and coding to go on simultaneously. It becomes easier for developers to answer questions and for the QA team to understand a project.
The agile process encourages proactivity, sharing responsibilities, and experiments within reasonable bounds. Documenting can be a collective process with engineers learning to write, tech writers learning about engineering, and someone managing the document to keep it neat.
How Remote Working Affects Agile Practices
The remote mode brings in distractions. We don’t mean QA outsource or similar practices, this is about the work-from-home situation. People are often forced to share working space with other family members, including children.
Also, agile teams are close-knit and value instant personal communication — unattainable goal in times of social distancing. Choosing software that allows simulating a co-located work is paramount. It is also essential to discuss delivery principles and define objective performance indicators.
Tips on Making Development More Agile
Adopting agile practices might not be easy, especially for big companies. Sought-after speed and flexibility require changes in the management of the development processes. Sticking to the following principles will help achieve the desired transformation.
Adopt Constant Iterations
Software development is not a static process. After passing all stages of a Waterfall model, a final product might be not relevant for a market anymore. Continuous iterations and overlapping development phases help optimize both coding and QA resources.
All team members work together from start to finish, each focusing on their specialty and receiving useful insights from fellow team members. The common task is to release a good product within the set deadlines.
Encourage Openness
Instead of hierarchy, agile promotes interplay between team members based on continuous communication and transparency. Everyone is deeply involved in the agile development process and needs to be aware of the details. Sharing information and frequent feedback makes cooperation effective.
Inspire Multi-Functional Learning
Developers and QA engineers don’t get distracted by learning things beyond their direct roles. On the contrary, they acquire broader knowledge so they can solve problems faster.
Multilearning boosts creativity. Experts play by the rules and cannot tolerate mistakes. Non-experts are often unfamiliar with the standards and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo.
Introduce The New Mission
Revenue may remain the primary reason for launching a new product, but consider introducing an added value. Challenge a team to create a video conferencing platform they would want to use, a social network they lack or change the way customers use a product.
Forget About Close Control
Rigid rules eliminate spontaneous ideas. Self-control, peer control, and established checkpoints are more effective and show who is actually devoted to the project.
Better Try Than Guess
Agile is about learning from failed attempts. Small wins are still wins. Fail is also a result, for it shows that an idea doesn’t work and changes are essential. Unless a team tries creating/implementing something, they cannot be certain what works and what doesn’t.
Agility & Quality Assurance
Traditionally, testing starts only after the development ends. The agile SDLC model centers on quality and reconsiders the order. QA process and development can start simultaneously, and both evolve around short timeframes. An agile test strategy introduces some other changes as well.
- Documentation testing. This rare but useful practice helps avoid gaps in software logic and understand the functionality better.
- Test-driven development. TDD starts with QA engineers writing tests for a small part of software functionality. Developers create a small amount of code at a time, making it clearer and bug-free.
- Customer-friendly approach. Constant feedback allows a team to understand if a product meets the requirements and remains user friendly. If people creating software cannot figure out its features, customers won’t be able to either.
Bottom Line
The recent events gave tech entrepreneurs a chance to reflect on the ways they are doing business and understand the importance of agile project management. But it is easier to change during times of emergency than stick to agile principles after the situation stabilizes.
Through all these years of delivering software testing services remotely, we’ve been mastering our agile methods and online communication skills. If you have a product that needs fast and high-standard testing, we’ll be glad to hear from you and participate at any stage. Contact us to discuss the details.
