Agile is known to improve software development, but there are huge benefits to using Agile that impact your team and customers.
Good practices lead to better products, happier employees, more engaged users, and better growth. It’s a waterfall-like trickle down effect if you will.
But unlike Waterfall development models, Agile has quick turnaround times and leaves room for innovation.
Create Time Savings
Agile encourages constant feedback and communication between programmers, customers, and users. It helps companies operate and produce results more quickly and efficiently.
It smoothly accommodates change requests, meaning essential changes can be implemented in a timely manner.
This is unlike the Waterfall model, which struggles to cope with any required changes during a project.
More feedback means:
less time wasted building useless things
more time spent building the right thing
the right thing gets delivered on time
Improve Team Morale
Agile helps maintain a sustainable work pace, which keeps your team’s’ morale high:
Agile lets every project team member become empowered to make decisions and move forward with development.
Agile breaks work into short development cycles, letting you quickly achieve results. Products ship faster. But with Waterfall and other similar methods, product iterations can take weeks or months. It feels like a comparative lifetime of waiting.
Developers love shipping code. Agile lets them ship more often.
If employees aren’t straining to meet unreasonable deadlines, they’ll be happier. Happy employees stick around. Happy employees also result in happy customers.
Increase Customer/User Engagement
Agile works best with constant communication with customers and users. It keeps products on track and makes sure the products address actual customer needs.
Combine communication with regular usability testing. Not only are you building something the end-user wants, but you’re checking throughout the development process that it actually works!
XP Agile’s frequent releases increase customer visibility too. Every time your customer sees an update and progress, they’ll feel engaged and happier.
I don’t know about you, but I prefer happy customers.
Talking with users and customers early on and throughout the development process to understand their needs will guide your choices. You’ll develop a user-focused product, and hopefully a product the user loves.
Satisfy Customers
XP Agile advocates continuous testing throughout development cycles. Through paired programming and test-driven development, code stays clean. Clean code keeps the bugs out.
I’d rather catch bugs during early test iterations while I can still correct and, consequently, still deliver on time to my clients. Plus, users hate bugs. If you can minimize bugs on the front end, your customers will have fewer opportunities for aggravation.
A Model Engineered for Success
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you: Agile development leads to more growth, happier employees, and happy customers.
It’s the best of all worlds. You deliver a product on time that meets your users needs (with minimal bugs) while keeping your employees happy.