Benefits of Agile Software Development and Measuring the Benefits of Agile Software Development [#AgileBenefits #MeasureAgileBenefits #AgileViews]
Benefits of Agile Software Development and Measuring the Benefits of Agile Software Development [#AgileBenefits #MeasureAgileBenefits #AgileViews]
Benefits of Agile Software Development
1. Improved Employee Morale
2. Improved Productivity
3. Happier Customers
4. Less Finger Pointing
5. More Failure, Sooner
1. Improved Employee Morale
At the core of Agile is letting people do the work they want to do, which in a technology organization is usually to build software products and platforms. This alone helps to make Agile development attractive to more people. But, also, because input is sought from all levels of stakeholders before decisions and commitments are made, team members feel more ownership of their work.
2. Improved Productivity
With improvements in employee morale come improvements in energy, greater engagement, and more hard work to get things done. By implementing Agile software development, precious hours and days are better spent and more work is accomplished.
3. Happier Customers
With improved productivity comes more features, sooner and better, leading to improved customer value. When you deliver more value to your customers it makes them happier.
4. Less Finger Pointing
Greater buy-in and productivity means there is less finger-pointing and concern about making mistakes, mistakes are a part of Agile development. Requirements documents and fixed budgets do not take away risk. They only make it more likely that projects will fail and that people will blame others.
5. More Failure, Sooner
By failing more and in smaller amounts, you can avoid failing in large ways later on.
Measuring the Benefits of Agile Software Development
Improved productivity should be something that you can directly monitor using Agile itself, since a good scrum master will keep tabs on velocity and will be able to see if, over time, teams are increasing their throughput.
There are many variables here and knowing that you are making progress on delivering more features takes some careful thought—consistent processes and estimation using story points can help set you on the right path.
A number of customers also look into value stream management tools, which can help keep track of the value you are creating for customers and show how your software is delivering that value for their business.
Customer satisfaction is hopefully something you are already measuring. If you are not, you should start taking a look at customer satisfaction so that you can be sure that you are improving it over time. Delivering new features is key to keeping existing customers happy and also key to bringing in new customers and staying ahead of the competition.
Employee satisfaction is also something that many people measure already, turnover statistics and 360 reviews should be keeping you on the pulse of what is happening within your organization.
Finger-pointing and failure are perhaps harder to measure, they may show up in employee satisfaction (finger-pointing) and customer satisfaction (more failure, sooner). But these are indirect measures.
Proper use of sprint retrospectives could help both of these—understanding what did not work and changing it is part of the Agile culture. There are a number of tools to help manage retrospectives.
Adapted from:
The Benefits of Agile Software Development and How to Measure Them:
Exadel