System Development using the Agile process

Successful digital service providers will be the ones who are agile and fast-moving, highly efficient and customer-centric and those who know how to partner to deliver the services their customers want.

 
Agile development is in practice for a decade now and still many organizations prefer to continue in their traditional process for software development instead of adoption of agile process. The current situation is not because the benefits of agile development is not well understood, but due to lack of micro level plans for adoption.  There is possibility for every software project to adopt development principles and manifesto to large extent. Typical list of process steps are mentioned below.

 If all processes and principles mentioned in agile processes are followed in an ideal condition, then project success rate in terms of meeting timeline and budget is likely for more than 90 % project. But in reality the success rate is very low and that brings the question mark on where things go wrong. Most important among all points is the customer and customer interaction, which never happens. Agile process makes it little linear by mentioning that customer proxy can take the role of customer in case customer is not available due to the busy schedule. Most of the failure happens due to this reason as agile process story estimation and story point computation starts with proper understanding between the group of developers and customers.

The root cause of agile project failures are due to below mentioned reasons, which worth noting to incorporate in the successive agile projects.

    1.       Involvement of actual customer rather than proxy customer

    2.       Include the cost of customer/s time in the budget

3.       Ensure technical customer and cost controlling customer/s are included for collaboration with          the development team, which is very difficult to achieve in mega projects.

4.      There should be some other parallel collaboration between customer and developers other than       system / software development.  For example some team game or cooking or trekking should               be considered as other areas of collaboration which opens up understanding of body language             with ease during discussion on stories and acceptance criteria.