More than ever before, organizations and businesses continue to put an emphasis on executing cost-effective projects without disruptions. As a result, R&D development companies are promoting the use of agile methods and SCRUM to help meet the needs of their customers such as wireless OEMs.

In order to deliver the best plan possible and eliminate any potential project risks, the agile method aims to do things in smaller increments, known as SCRUM, which helps to minimize overall risk and allows the project to adapt quickly to any changes that need to be made during the development stages. Each increment is worked on by a team through a full development cycle, including planning, requirements analysis, design, development or coding, unit testing and acceptance testing. The ultimate goal is to create a working feature in a larger system or a full product to be demonstrated or released as part of a product or solution.

This strategy grew out of real-life project experiences from leading software professionals who had experienced the challenges and limitations of traditional waterfall project development in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the various development phases. Agile (News - Alert) development is response to these issues associated with traditional software development – both in terms of overall philosophy as well as specific processes. 

Image 1: The benefits of agile development versus the waterfall development process.

One of the many key benefits of incorporating this strategy into a project plan is that this method emphasizes face-to-face communication and is more effective than written documents. Most agile teams are co-located to facilitate such communication and team size is typically small (five to nine people) to help make communication collaboration easier. Larger development efforts are delivered by multiple teams working toward a shared and transparent goals or different parts of an effort. This requires a good coordination of priorities across teams and the work can also be distributed in several places or sites.

By leveraging the agile method, development teams experience a lightweight process that supports a focus on the rapid delivery of business value. This helps organizations significantly reduce the overall risk associated with development and can ensure that business value is maximized throughout the development process. By continuously aligning the delivered software with desired business needs, teams can easily adapt to changing requirements throughout the project.

With the transparency afforded by agile development projects, customers have witnessed stronger results and have benefitted from being provided with real-time updates on the status of set requirements. Overwhelmingly, customers agree that the agile method has led to better quality and bug free software development.