10 Benefits Why Software Product Companies Should Go For Agile Methodology

There are compelling reasons why the agile methodology is becoming mainstream. Here are the ten key benefits why product companies should embrace agile methodology principles and practices in their product development lifecycle.

ROI

The iterative nature of agile development means features are delivered incrementally, which aid realising the benefits from the beginning as the product continues to evolve.

Time To Market

Research says that most of all market leaders were first to market. Moreover, the upward revenue from incremental delivery of product features, agile development philosophy also supports the concept of early and regular releases, and beta version for a market test.

Right Product To Market
It’s very common in traditional development to deliver a ‘successful’ project in IT terms and find that the product delivered is not what was expected. In contrast, agile development focuses totally on building the right product, not delivering a piece of software testing services. Ability of agile methodology to embrace changes at any point of development help the team to build the right product.

Transparency
Successful product development needs a full involvement of the client throughout the project, from prioritizing features to iteration planning and review sessions to frequent software builds containing new features.
Agile development is a very cooperative, collaborative and transparent approach encourages active ‘user’ involvement throughout the product development. This provides excellent visibility for every member of the project team on how the project is going at any given time and how the product is getting shaped, which ensure that expectations are met in time.

Early Alert Of Problems
Agile is an iterative development model with small incremental releases made visible to the stakeholders help to identify any issues early and make it easier for responding to change. It ensures that any proactive decisions can be taken at the earliest possible chance, while there’s still time to make a material difference to the outcome.
This early alert provides enough time to alter the planned product roadmap before any more time or money is wasted.

Controlled Schedule And Cost
Agile development principles are different from traditional development. Here changes are accepted and requirements emerge and evolve as the product is developed. By using time-boxed, fixed schedule iterations, the cost of each iteration is foreseeable and limited to the amount of work that can be performed by the team.

The above approach of fixed timescales and evolving requirements enables a controlled budget.

Meaningful Project Milestones
Agile development has milestones more often than traditional project management methods. Adding to that, agile milestones are also more meaningful. It focuses on Customer Acceptance and project produces actual working software that the customer can test and evaluate to accept or not rather than keeping a check on artificial measures of progress such as a requirements sign-off, design review, code complete, testing complete etc.

Customer Focused
Agile usually uses user stories with business-focused acceptance criteria to define product features. By focusing product features on the needs of actual customers, each feature incrementally delivers value, not just a software program. This also provides the opportunity to beta software testing after each iteration, gaining valuable feedback early in the software development and providing the ability to make changes as needed as we move forward.

Focus On Business Value
Agile practice aid client to determine the priority of features, the team understands what is most significant to the client’s business, and can deliver features incrementally in such a way that add valuable to each release.

Agile practices deliver just enough functionality to meet stakeholder’s needs which in turn to be a business need. It delivers the minimal functionality with high quality. That means, it is enough to get the job done what is needed for the business.

Increased Collaboration And Ownership
The active participation and collaboration among stakeholders make agile development a much more communicative methodology for most people, which in turn helps to build highly motivated, high performance and highly cooperative team.

The development team, the product owner, and other stakeholders work closely. Daily updates let the development team organize around work completed, future work, and blockades. Also the development team can demonstrate and discuss the product directly with stakeholders. This makes agile methodology a much more rewarding approach for everyone.