Software Engineering Practices for the Agile Success

“Value & Delivery” is an important pillar in the organization’s agility compass. Indeed, the speed of value delivery of an organization reflects its agility rate.

The four pillars of an agile organization

An Agile organization can adapt to changing market demands both rapidly and at a low cost. It aims to learn faster than its competitors and uses that learning to invest in the important work and to avoid wasting resources on low-value work.

Cesário Oliveira Ramos | Ilia Pavlichenko (2022). CREATING AGILE ORGANIZATIONS : A Systemic Approach.

According to this accurate definition, an agile organization should deliver and learn rapidly. Adopting the Software Engineering (SE) best practices helps IT Entreprises to reach these purposes.

For example, the code refactoring practice touches directly five of the 12 Agile principles at least :

1. Deliver working software frequently: Refactoring can help teams deliver working software more frequently by reducing technical debt and improving code quality.
2. Technical excellence: Refactoring is an important tool for maintaining technical excellence by improving the design, structure, and maintainability of the codebase.
3. Simplicity: Refactoring can help simplify the codebase by removing unnecessary complexity and improving readability.
4. Accommodate changing requirements: Refactoring can make it easier to accommodate changing requirements by improving the flexibility and maintainability of the codebase.
5. Customer satisfaction: By improving the quality of the code, refactoring can help ensure that the software meets the customer’s needs and expectations.

However, the SE best practices can be thought as technical realizations, so they don’t evolve the organization’s agility. That it depends on how the agile mindset has been growth in the organization.

Delay without Software Engineering best practices

When the agile mindset is well set up within the organization, the SE best practices are considered as adaptive tools which help to enhance the company’s Time-to-market.

Software Engineering best practices help to move faster

The code refactoring is an example among others. In the table below, I tried to link other known SE best practices to the 12 agile principles :

Link between SE best practices and agile principles

Finally, encouraging employees to add their own engineering expertise is a recommended approach once an organization has adopted the right agile mindset.

Reviewed by: Solène Méhaut, Nassim Bouazabia, Zakaria Rahioui

The illustrations are made by the author (hope you like them :)