Basic Agile Principles: How to employ them in your organization
The Agile Manifesto sought to revolutionize the delivery of software products, serving as the answer to various problems that have been made evident during the ’90s. Seventeen thought leaders gathered in 2001 and produced the Agile Manifesto and the Twelve Principles of Agile Software.
Since then, more and more organizations adopt Agile methodologies in an effort to streamline their processes. An effective way to the successful adoption of these methods is to start by understanding the twelve principles and seeing how they can fit in the everyday activities of the current workplace.
Before we delve deep in each of them, what you need to keep in mind is the overall sentiment of the type of culture that they represent, which can be summarized as an environment in which change is welcome, the customer is the epicentre of the work and development is brought into alignment with business needs.
Without further ado, here are the twelve principles of agile development and the way to employ them in your organization in an organic and satisfactory fashion.
Principle #1: Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery
A happy customer is one that can get his hands on working pieces of software at regular intervals. If you have been presenting only the finished product so far, go Agile and break down development into regular sprints that will have a functioning outcome. Present the outcomes at a frequent basis to your customer and keep him/her happy and updated.
Principle #2: Accommodate changing requirements throughout the development process
Have you noticed that a requested feature change results in all kinds of bottlenecks in the development process? Agile urges you to be proactive and solve these kinds of issues before they even manifest. After all, in an Agile ecosystem, change should be welcome, not dreaded.
Principle #3: Frequent delivery of working software
This principle goes hand in hand with principle #1 and Scrum is a recommended framework that accommodates both with its software sprint approach.
Principle #4: Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers throughout the project
To achieve alignment between development and business needs, you should establish a thorough communication between the business and the the technical team. Understand the different nature of each team and build an effective collaboration framework that will maximize both their efficiencies and will lead to better decisions.
Principle #5: Support, trust, and motivate the people involved Motivation is the key ingredient in the recipe for productive and happy teams that constantly deliver top-notch results. Individuals in leadership positions should be able to serve others and not rule over them. They should be able to listen, respect and empower employees. So, if you are thinking of adopting Agile methods you should also invest in a Servant Leadership approach, which will result in satisfied and fullfilled employees.
Principle #6: Enable face-to-face interaction
Development teams need to be located in such a way as to allow face-to-face communication, which leads to better collaboration. Agile is not so effective when applied to remote teams, so you may want to rethink the location of your teams.
Principle #7: Working software is the primary measure of progress
All development teams need to measure progress and there are several factors that progress can be measured by. Agile sets working software as the definitive factor, something which also complies with Principle #1 and #3.
Principle #8: Agile processes to support a consistent development pace
Development teams need to set and maintain a speed at which they come up with functioning pieces of software. Maintaining this speed is crucial to the motivation and the energy levels of team members. A good way to do this is to employ a Scrum framework and keep sprints short, to avoid burnout and ensure top quality for your project.
Principle #9: Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility
Agile methods are all about improving, so you need to make sure that close attention is paid to the enhancement of skills through their timely review and the punctual solving of possible barriers to improvement.
Principle #10: Simplicity
As one of the most effective software principle goes… K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple, Stupid)!
Principle #11: Self-organizing teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and designs
Strong are the teams when they are given autonomy, decision-making power and ownership. In the Agile world, teams are not assembled in order to be told what to do but to be able to grow and adapt to change.
Principle #12: Regular reflections on how to become more effective
The path to improvement takes regular pauses along the way for reflection. Reflection is of paramount importance when you are seeking to form ever-evolving teams of empowered individuals that all strive to produce high-quality software products.
