Agile Software Development Process

Topics: Agile Project Management, Software Words: 598 Pages: 2

Agile software development involves an iterative process of creating software where different developers and designers work with the client to ensure that business goals and vision are met. It provides an early and continuous development of software, allowing teams to gather feedback and make changes to suit the dynamic requirements. The software development process starts the same as the waterfall approach with a vision and goals, but agile development begins when coders are provided with enough information to build the initial pieces of the software. Although the agile software development process is beneficial in multiple ways, it has both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

Disadvantages

The software development process starts as soon as ‘just’ enough requirements are provided for the coding. This infers less documentation is required leading to saving time and costs (Ali, 2017).
Project managers provide a stepwise direction to developers on the prioritized backlog, including short-term and long-term tasks
Project testers work closely with developers to enhance automation and immediate testing of implemented changes. This results in fewer defects in the software.
Narrow fully-functional pieces of the project are delivered at the end of an iteration.
Each piece is demonstrated to stakeholders at the end of an iteration, and feedback is provided to guide future iterations. This enables the development teams to respond quickly to changing requirements throughout the project (Taibi et al., 2017)
Agile offers transparency in the development process, where customers are provided with real-time updates of the product. The facilitated interaction and collaboration between developers and customers help resolve difficulties (Kamei et al., 2017).
It allows the developers to enhance business value through rapid delivery and reducing the risks linked to the development process
Agile development enables developers to deliver products that meet customer needs because the project requirements are acquired iteratively. This approach also improves customer satisfaction as the completed software contains all the desired functions.

Interference of product owner in the development process. This occurs mainly when the customer has technical skills but does not understand the source code leading to many user stories. Consequently, this hampers the development process.
Increased development time. This results from the various agile events such as daily meetings and sprint planning, which consumes a lot of time (Kamei et al., 2017).
Management overhead because of a large number of small teams that require constant communication and coordination (Kamei et al., 2017).
The priority list from the product owner is difficult to create and maintain.
Agile informs that many teams should be involved in the software development process, which might increase the complexity of project requirements in each iteration.
Poor coordination in large projects due to the number of teams involved and lack of documentation can adversely affect the architectural decisions and project delivery (Taibi et al., 2017).
Project planning is inadequate in agile because each iteration defines the subsequent steps but causes code refactoring where development teams clarify and simplify the existing code. In essence, the lack of continuous refactoring makes it difficult to extend the code from one iteration to another without changing its behavior.
It is easy to misunderstand agile development for novice developers and new team members due to lack of documentation, which increases the delivery time and development costs (Ali, 2017).
The project requires skilled personnel to identify and perform risk analysis before progressing to the next iteration.

To sum up, the agile software development process provides multiple benefits, including timely and continuous delivery of the project. An analysis of agile methodology’s advantages and disadvantages depicts an imperative approach that simplifies software development. Proper planning is essential to ensure an effective process and delivery of the end-product to the customer.

References

Ali, K. (2017). A Study of Software Development Life Cycle Process Models. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science, 8(1), 15-23. Web.

Taibi, D., Lenarduzzi, V., Pahl, C., & Janes, A. (2017). Microservices in agile software development: A workshop-based study into issues, advantages, and disadvantages. In Proceedings of the XP2017 Scientific Workshops, 23, 1-5. Web.

Kamei, F., Pinto, G., Cartaxo, B., & Vasconcelos, A. (2017). On the benefits/limitations of agile software development: An interview study with Brazilian companies. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 154-159. Web.