Updated June 1, 2023
Introduction To Agile Benefits
An iterative and incremental set of management practices is known as Agile, which grew out of leading software professionals’ experiences of the real-life project by facing challenges and limitations of traditional waterfall development on project after project. Agile development focuses on the rapid delivery of business value by offering an easy framework for providing help to teams and giving them a constantly changing technical and functional area. As a result, organizations can minimize the overall risk significantly connected with software development due to the benefits of Agile Software Development.
Benefits of Agile Development
Given below are the various benefits of agile development:
1. Product Quality gets Better
Regular check-ups are made during the project cycle to see that the product is working fine during the development, which also helps rectify any error or issue by the product owner by keeping the team aware. Agile also helps to define and elaborate the needs on time to maintain the knowledge about product features as relevant as possible by daily testing and continuous integration into the development process, allowing the team to address new issues without delaying it by taking advantage of automated testing tools, allowing the team to continuously improving process and team.
2. Improves Customer Satisfaction
Due to high visibility and flexibility to change in the progress of development, as the product owner is always involved, it implies customer engagement and higher customer satisfaction, demonstrating working functionalities to customers in every sprint review. Agile also keeps the backlog of products updated and prioritized to respond efficiently and quickly to the changes made and demonstrate working functionality to customers in every sprint review by delivering a product to market quickly and more often with every release, ultimately keeping customers engaged and involved throughout the project.
3. Better Team Efficiency
Agile development team members are highly efficient at getting work done as they share a collaborative culture and efficiency. The predictability of the Agile project is fulfilled when everyone agrees on the most critical work. Then each team member focuses on that most important work, and the entire team works together and moves forward, unitedly falling into regular cycles of work production.
4. Maintaining transparency
Agile development software provides a unique opportunity for the customers to be involved in the project throughout, helping maintain transparency and thus creating more customer satisfaction.
5. Helps in Reducing risk
The techniques of Agile help in eliminating the chances of absolute project failure by always having a working product from the very start of the first sprint, to avoid project failure by making sure that there is a short time between initial project investment, developing in sprints, by allowing the organization to pay little expense as they generate revenue early because of self-funding projects. Furthermore, through daily scrum meetings and constant team communication, constant feedback on products and processes is provided, due to which end-user or customers can see and react to new features regularly.
6. Early and Improved Project Predictability
On the grounds of cost and return on investment, the value of the project is calculated by companies. If the rate of investment (ROI) exceeds the cost, the company decides to carry on the project. This is why predictability is essential in a project nowadays, as, without ROI, it is impossible to predict the project’s success. Agile helps predict the cost of the project to decide whether or not to continue with the project.
7. Capability to Adapt to Change by Software Development Team
With the help and guidance of the project manager, at every step of product development, the team adapts to changes when and where required, as the project managers cannot look into the future. Agile project management can adapt to change, which helps embrace Agile completely in all work processes. By becoming efficient, project teams can meet the customer’s needs without overspending, leading to a heightened focus on quality. As the teams recognize that the product is a direct outcome of their efforts and hard work, they become more quality-oriented.
8. Provides Stakeholder Engagement
Agile offers multiple opportunities for stakeholder and team engagement both before and after each sprint. Agile promotes a high degree of collaboration between teams, involving different types of stakeholders at every step of the project. This active involvement truly helps the team understand the business vision. Additionally, delivering working software early and frequently increases stakeholders’ trust in the team’s ability to deliver high-quality software. This, in turn, encourages greater stakeholder engagement in the project.
9. Ensures development
Agile development software is an iterative process. During the development process, the agile methodology offers early benefits by delivering features incrementally. This enables rapid and early product delivery, granting customers a first-mover advantage and facilitating an understanding of their requirements. Agile allows for the adaptation of work processes based on changing needs.
10. Increased Ownership by Customized Team Structures
Since agile promotes self-management, the responsibility for making decisions primarily lies with the members of the scrum team rather than managers. Agile projects can have multiple scrum teams on one project due to the limited size of the development team, which is five to nine people. The agile project provides unique opportunities to adapt and customize team structures and work environments as it is self-managing and size-limiting.
11. Easy Application Maintenance
As multiple developers code every part of the system, there cannot be chances of project failure because only one person knows it well enough to make changes.
12. Time-Consuming and Accurate Technical Documentation
Agile documentation differs from traditional development approaches by emphasizing only on the artifacts that represent completed work rather than wasting a lot of time on documentation that may remain unused and unmaintained. Furthermore, audit traceability is much better because sign-offs are specific to discreet features instead of a single approval.
13. Satisfied End Result
Agile projects have yielded much higher scores than waterfall projects as per customer satisfaction surveys conducted and measured per the seven-year metrics analysis.
Recommended Articles
This has been a guide to Agile Benefits. Here we have discussed the various types of benefits of agile software development. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
