Technology 24 Apr, 2024.
Every sustainable system in existence comprises a number of actions that are collectively called a process. Standardized processes are often a norm in many industries, even with software development. However, each organization in this arena tends to have its proverbial idiosyncrasies that are hooked up with standardized methodologies just as tendons are tied to muscles.
This ensures smooth operations as easy as extending and flexing your arm; when developing software development at Cubix, this is the idea applied to ensure a smoother than smooth process and optimum results.
It’s noteworthy to assert that knowing what works best is what we have learned over many years, finetuning and applying the valuable bits to ensure a refined experience for our clients and partners.
Indeed, there’s a systematic rhythm in the IT-business workflow that project managers and their software project development teams strive to create.
Project development comprises a workforce’s skills, experience, and expertise. But that’s not all, as you’ll witness project managers diving right into the software development process implementing particular approaches and methodologies to build out the projects they are handed.
And since you just landed on our page, you might like to have a visual tour of how (we) "CUBIX" proceed with the Agile project management in software development as an entire team.
Why do we love Agile Project Management (APM)?
Agile project management paves the way for swift and feature-driven software project development. The agile methodology permits the team to work in sprints as it encourages nimbleness throughout the project development cycle.
Agile project management prevents the mess that often occurs due to modifications at already-developed stages —projects are in flexible development cycle modes, where there is low or zero risk when you need to make teaks to portions that have already been developed.
Agile project management provides an effective collaboration that ensures that your project has been developed on mutual understanding and equal partnership of each expert involved in the team. This efficient approach results in software project development that perfectly matches every little requirement according to the client’s standards. Cubix feels deep gratitude toward its adroit project managers who perfectly blend the tech-savvy team’s expertise with agile methodology.
Traditional Project Management
Traditional project management proceeds with the sequential flow. The under-development project runs the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which comprises the initiation, planning, execution, testing, monitoring, and deployment phases. For traditional project management, projects are meticulously and clearly defined at the planning phase, and the whole development process occurs, keeping the planning as the base.
This methodology suits small-sized projects best. However, project managers often face hurdles with budget maintenance and timeliness by adopting this method. Therefore, time and budget vary, but the requirements remain fixed, which makes building feature-rich and result-driven software production difficult. However, with this methodology:
Some drawbacks of this approach are that it eliminates the involvement or feedback of customers once the project is in execution. Hence, the company gathers all the crucial requirements at the initiation and planning phase. Once the customer confirms the project requirements and specifications, no modifications can’t be made at any stage. This can pose quite a problem if there is something that needs to be changed, integrated, removed, etc., at any stage. And clients won’t be too happy about not being able to change things as development moves along.
Agile Project Management
You choose agile project management when you want to be free as a bird. Thus, for all the projects that we have built so far, agile methodology made it possible for us to deliver things as per the clients’ demands. Moreover, it assists the project manager with carrying out the best practices for the development team.
The agile methodology is heavily based on team members interacting and passing their input for development, adaptability, and adjustability regarding the modifications that take place from time to time.
We appreciate agile project management because it comprises essential elements crucial for effective development. The agile methodology allows you to:
A Quick Summary of the Agile Methodology
Like traditional project management, agile project management also consists of some phases that help fulfill project development. These phases allow you to include modifications while preventing significant delays in project deployment.
1. Requirement specifications and planning
At this initial stage, the project is put through a rigorous determination and detail through the SoW (Scope of Work). However, the team also plans to keep in mind that changes may also occur during the development phase or other phases, which impact the planning phase. Therefore, the team studies the draft project requirements while keeping the business values upfront.
2. Creating the guideline
Everyone needs guidelines to proceed further with better preparation. That is why it is essential to create guidelines based on blueprints. For example, the guidelines could be based on the draft design features, estimated requirements for the particular sprint, and many other aspects.
3. Build and test
The project development team builds the features, tests them, and delivers them after each sprint is completed.
4. Continuous deployment of features
The features are continuously released to the client for approval of the overall functionality.
5. Review
The completed sprints are reviewed by the development team and stakeholders. This approach helps the entire team stay focused on continuous up-gradation and improvement while preparing for the next sprint.
6. Iterate
Re-examine the goal for the next sprint release and proceed.
You might want to read about What Role a Project Manager Fulfills in a Software Development Company
How Agile Methodology Works Wonders?
Cubix embraces the advantages of agile project management methodology. To that end, it becomes a good headache for project managers and their teams to have, as they proceed deeper into large-scale project development.
Agile project development has eased the pain of handling giant-sized projects since this methodology reduces the complexity. It makes sure the small and easy-to-understand project segments would be perfectly determined, developed, and tested in a small-time frame of 2 to 4 weeks, called Sprints.
"Agile Project Management (APM) is an execution-biased model, not a planning-and-control-biased model." Jim Highsmith – Software Engineer and Author. Highsmith also added, "Agile project management principles and frameworks encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to clients."
Now let’s see how the agile methodology is used in the project management process.
Reduce Potential Risk
The agile approach guarantees that a software product will meet all quality standards and business values. Therefore, the product development’s risk of failure is low. Furthermore, this methodology predicts and ensures that projects under development will be of high quality at the time of completion.
More Transparency
Every team member gets involved at the project development planning stage, sharing their ideas for proceeding further with a project. Moreover, the customer is the main stakeholder of the entire development process, and input from this end is important, particularly when sprints are delivered. Thus, the customer guides the team if any modification is necessary.
Robust Process Control
Project Managers can easily track project progress through timelines based on Time and Budget. In addition, agile project management permits the team to break large-scale and complex projects into smaller parts to achieve intended tasks. This way, more quality-based development can be assured.
Increased Product Quality
When the project splits into smaller and manageable parts, developing each part gets more intensive. Saying that, the final product rocks the market with its high-quality features and robust functionality.
Customer-focused Development Approach
The agile method allows continuous delivery of features to the customer at the end of every sprint. Therefore, each feature is developed according to the client’s requirements and approval. Thus, agile methodology highlights the customer’s need at the heart of the project.
You might want to read about How Full-Cycle Product Development Takes Your Product from Prototype to Production
Principles of Agile Project Management
As per the PMI’s annual global Pulse of the Profession report, it is observed that about 48% of projects (in general) do not reach completion within the planned period, and about 43% exceed their budget.
Moreover, it has also been observed that about 31% of projects aren’t successful when matched with their initial objectives and business purpose. This clearly shows the tremendous state of failure. These discouraging figures highlight the need to adopt an innovative and out-of-the-box approach that would comprise flexibility, adaptability, responsiveness, and high-performing project development capabilities.
We consider principles that add value to the process. Therefore, we apply APM’s innovative principles and fully understand how to apply these principles to our project development procedure. So, let’s see what those magic Agile principles are that we believe would work for clients and us.
Customer-focused approach throughout the development process
With agile project management, the customer plays an important and prominent role. In contrast, if you observe, with the traditional project management method, there is minimized or zero customer involvement in the development process. With the agile approach, the customer is involved in the process and is asked for input to develop the product.
Split large-sized projects into smaller parts
The agile approach prevents the team from struggling with giant-sized projects. Therefore, the agile methodology allows us to break projects into smaller parts, making them easier to manage.
Continuous delivery of working features
It allows the team to deliver what has been developed so far. This way, customers can review, approve, and ask for modifications if needed — the frequent delivery of products helps improve the product’s overall performance.
Frequent collaboration of stakeholders for the improved product quality
The agile approach motivates all stakeholders to get involved throughout the project development. Their suggestions and remarks can be taken into account for the project’s improvement.
A motivating environment for the project development team members
Creating a motivating and collaborative working environment for the team members is a top requirement. This is the topmost priority when project managers want to support their team throughout the entire project development cycle. And it’s important because it matters, especially when the team faces hurdles and challenges.
You are more likely to make progress, overcome problems, and work out solutions for your product if your development team members are motivated, burden-free, and enthusiastic.
Face-to-face communication is preferable.
In-person communication is vital to convey your ideas, suggestions, and other project-related important messages. Therefore, all stakeholders should call a meeting with their development team to carry out effective and fruitful communication.
Working software is the foremost progress measure.
If the software product works appropriately per the client’s demand and fulfills its role, you have achieved success. And that success team tells your team that they are successful as a development team.
A constant development pace is needed to remain focused
All the people involved in your software project development process, including your developers, users, testers, and sponsors, should maintain a consistent rate of development. This pace of development works to prevent the team from being over-stressed and going into panic at any stage. And with this momentum, the project would meet its deadline efficiently while maintaining quality. This momentum is an important feature in your software development process.
Pay Attention to the Technical Details
A continuous focus on the technical aspects of a project will help to constantly ensure better project quality.
Maintain simplicity
The more focus there is on simplicity, the more effective your project will be. You should avoid many unclear changes in the project. Keep it simple!
Encourage self-organization in the team.
It is essential to promote self-organization in the development team, as this reflects how well a team collaborates. With your client being your stakeholder, at some stage, there will be evidence of this collaboration surfacing for them to notice.
Regular performance measurements for improvement
The team needs to learn from past mistakes and improve their performance continuously. Therefore, project managers should regularly track their team’s performance and encourage them to learn and improve their technical and management qualities.
Some agile methodology frameworks
The agile project management framework is based on various core practices reflected in each example or type of APM framework. Agile project management is divided into various stages while it requires constant collaboration with the client.
The agile methodology provides parallelized and well-balanced development and testing practices. As per the statistics based on a survey of Development Pros‘, 92% of respondents indicated their companies adopted agile development methodology.
Kanban
There are six core practices on which Kanban is based. We must be careful with these six core practices for flawless implementation. You will need to visualize the workflow, limit workflow in progress, manage the overall workflow, make process policies explicit, and provide feedback loops and continuous improvement. Kanban is a framework that offers enhanced productivity and efficiency, better collaboration and team focus., more flexibility, visibility, and predictability.
Agile Scrum Methodology
The Scrum framework is another example of agile project management based on an iterative approach. It is one of the best project management frameworks, which is highly adaptable, flexible, efficient, and offers swift project development.
The Scrum framework makes the customer a priority throughout the project development process; thus, it is a customer-centric framework. It focuses on the customer’s specifications and offers transparency and effective collaboration. In addition, it reduces risk, predicts the development process from time to time, accepts modifications, is highly scalable, and so many other advantages are on the list.
When a client partners with a suitable software development company of their choice, they get a rich taste of the agile methodology implemented. Like Cubix, each company will have certain elements that it adheres to more than others. And that’s because of their experience, as they come to settle on and balance elements that suit their pursuit to project delivery. Indeed, it’s a smooth and crisp process that they enjoy leveraging simply because it is refined and satisfies all stakeholders.
Cubix is the home to a unique fleet of technical talent working as a family. Their agile methodology-driven collaborative input is evident in their smooth communication and momentum, which results in the dozens of projects they have delivered.
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