Thinking like an Agile Team

Software development is one of the most vital abilities a company must be able to perform in order to compete in today’s market. No matter the industry. However, software development wasn’t always this way and has only risen to this priority in the last few decades. Back in the 1990s, developing software was thought of in only perspective. The plan and document approach. Companies, teams, and project managers would sit down for long periods of time and attempt to document all of the planning, designing and estimating costs.

This approach is not only extremely difficult to predict and estimate the information you need, but it is also extremely error prone. If you generate pages and pages of documentation and then generate even more pages based upon those original pages, then what happens if you must make a change to an original document? Sounds like a cascade from hell. Due to the nature of plan and document if changes are made then it results in life becoming extremely difficult for the development teams. All of these factors led to too many failed software projects and fired project managers.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that software development teams started to take a slightly less and more manageable approach. This approach was coined as, Lightweight Software Development. This new lightweight framework included practices such as, scrum, dynamic software development, extreme programming and feature driven designs. A lot of these practiced are still used in today’s more modern version of the Lightweight Software Development (Agile). This was truly the beginning of Agile Development.

It wasn’t long before many development teams around the world were in some way performing the Lightweight Software Development framework in some fashion. In 2001, a group of 17 reputable leaders from different Lightweight teams all decided to meet in Utah and hash out a formal Lightweight Software Development framework that could be adapted world-wide. After long discussions, the group decided on a few new standards.

First off, this group of leaders renamed the Lightweight approach to Agile. Second, they generated a document named The Agile Manifesto. This manifesto provides a set of strong values that agile possess, instead of cookie cutter directions and practices. For instance, agile teams value working code over documentation. However, this does not mean that agile teams do not document. Just that working code provides more value in modern software development.

The main reason Agile was coined is that software development teams need a framework that is heavily adaptable to change. Change is always going to occur during software development and it helps to be better adjusted to it when it happens rather than letting it cause a project to fail. Adopting an agile mentality should force one to start thinking of a collection of small pictures, instead of just the big picture.

Work Cited:

“Agile at Work: Thinking like an Agile Team. “ Lynda.com – from LinkedIn, https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Thinking-like-agile-team/175073/379428-4.html Accessed 6 Nov. 2017.

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https://www.giminstitute.org/can-large-companies-really-innovate-like-startups/