Software development continued to evolve over the years, and we have seen the shift from waterfall development methodology to agile development. While the previous was more time consuming and involved the project going through various stages, the latter is fast-paced and segregates the project in sprints.

Since increasing customer demand now requires a faster time to market the software products while there is an uncompromising quality focus to stand apart in the competition, agile development has gained more traction than ever before. There are too many advantages of agile development from a faster development pace to uncompromising product quality to the lesser cost and technical loads.

Agile Methodology Benefits

Here we explain the key advantages of agile methodology for software projects.

1. Reduced Risks

Since market demands and the competitive landscape are continuously evolving, there are always increased risks for software projects. Whether the entire development efforts and cost incurred by a software development project will achieve its desired Return on Investment (ROI) is always a grey and complicated area depending on many factors. Agile development is the right methodology to allow you better control of these risk factors.

Since in agile development, a software project is distributed into multiple sprints responsible for building complete parts of software products. According to the risk exposure, the development company can incorporate changes in each sprint without messing with other sprints. This allows bringing changes in the software projects flexibly and reducing market risks for the software projects.

2. Faster Time to Market

In agile development methodology, the entire software project is segregated into small modules appearing as independent sub-projects that share no dependence on each other. Moreover, every developer working on these sub-projects has a clear focus and ideas about their tasks. Since there is no or little dependence between these small sprints or sub-projects within the software project, simultaneously, various software parts are built that leads to faster development and time to market.

3. Resulting in Awesome Business Agility

Another great advantage of agile development is the agility of business processes. As agile development is very flexible and accommodating to changes and new trends, businesses can easily adapt to new development trends and change faster. At any stage of the software development project, the businesses can easily incorporate changes and trending features as well as design elements without requiring to restart the project all over. This helps businesses to ensure more agility and responsiveness.

4. Great Productivity and Collaboration

This sprint-based development that allows building different software parts simultaneously makes way for optimum productivity for the developers and the development team as a whole. This also minimizes the need for a lengthy discussion about the project at the initial stage while always allowing collaboration at later development stages. The project manager can check the status and progression of various sprints separately and delegate the next set of tasks accordingly.

5. Uncompromising Software Quality and Output

More than faster development, productivity, and other associated perks, what comes as the most important aspect of agile methodology is the uncompromising software quality and output. Thanks to the split development process, every part of the project can be tested separately in real-time, and the final product is very likely to have the least errors.

Since agile methodology opens up the scope of continuous feedback and feature integration, the software project enjoys more scope of improvement and quality output. Since, in complete contrast to the traditional waterfall method of development, the agile method allows continuous integration of quality features and user experience attributes throughout the project. The final development output is likely to be qualitatively better.

6. Brings Maintenance Requirements to a Minimum

For agile methodology, the post-development maintenance requirements stand at a minimum level, and there are far fewer tasks for maintaining a software product. Some of the common post-development maintenance tasks involved in software projects include detecting errors and defects, testing, and refactoring. These tasks continue to increase and accumulate with the needs of adding new features in a software project. This is where the agile method helps in keeping these tasks to a minimum.

In agile software development projects, the maintenance tasks or the technical debt is kept at a minimum by a streamlined simultaneous integration and testing process. All the required feature changes and different maintenance tasks keep getting added to the product backlog of the respective sprints, and at the time of next planning for tasks, they are incorporated into priorities. Thus, new integration and maintenance needs are continuously addressed throughout the app project without adding to the post-development tasks and technical debt.

7. Streamlined Development Process

One of the greatest advantages of the agile method is managing multiple software projects simultaneously and with ease. Apart from the simultaneous and faster development of a multitude of sprints, the project managers can engage the inter-team discussion and collaboration for each sprint. This helps to ease the load of tasks and boosts the project output through a streamlined development process. This also gives the development companies better means to keep track of the productivity and individual output in a software project.

8. Reduced Cost of Development

Thanks to the split development approach, the cost of every step and parts of the project can easily be calculated and tracked, providing you better control of the software development budget and cost. With agile methods, you can always keep track of the project and development cost and remain in total control of the allocation of your resources.

Conclusion

Software development companies around the world have embraced the agile method because of the wide-ranging advantages that we mentioned here above. Agile is likely to be the default development methodology for most software projects in the years to come.