Software Development Consulting and Coaching

Becoming Agile

Let's assume that you have to make a journey tomorrow and you try to plan it. These are two possible strategies:

1. Plan everything in the smallest detail from start to end: drive for exactly 10 miles, take a 5 minutes break, eat from 10:05 to 10:27, drive for 58 minutes, take a 23 minutes break and so on. If something unexpected happens do anything possible to stick to the plan.
2. Define a road-map to follow and deal with each step of the way.

You will certainly agree that you'd never use plan A; actually most people wouldn't even think about using it. However, this is how we are traditionally managing projects.

Agile methodologies correspond to the plan B of managing software development projects. Their primary advantages is that they are adaptable and more natural, and they can bring exceptional results.

Why become Agile?

Traditional methodologies have their advantages. Despite that, software projects still fail in a great proportion, especially projects developed for industries with a rapid-changing environment. Agile is not an universal panacea but addresses efficiently some well-known shortcomings of the traditional methodologies.

The main advantages of the Agile methods are:

• Responsiveness to Change
• Early Usable Results and Early Return of Investment
• Rapid Learning and Continuous Improvement

Agile software development processes such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, Feature Driven Development and Test Driven Development are on their way to becoming more and more adopted. You will want to become Agile when you understand the benefits explained through practical exercises in our Agile-related courses.

How to become Agile

Before deciding to introduce agile principles in your organization, be sure that Agile is what you need - and yes, we can help you with this activity-.

Depending on your specifics, we start identifying the practices that are fitted for you in order to address the current issues and/or to bring you the best benefits.

The next step is a sensitive one and this is why it must be treated with great attention: identify the best way to introduce the selected Agile practices in your company. Technical and business internal culture are the corner-stones upon we will build together the new mindset. Agility is more an attitude, this is why our courses have immediate results: the way the training is held helps participants to change their attitude to become Agile.

Guidance through implementation stages is another activity we do in order to make the transition smoother. You can choose to start the implementation following a more painful way with "trial and error" at every stage or you can use our experience in helping companies and teams to become Agile.

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