How the 12 Agile Principles Can Help a Business

The Agile and DevOps approach to software development is widely being adopted by various software companies due to the various benefits enjoyed by following this particular methodology. It provides a common foundation for making decisions about the best way to develop software. One of the major aspects of Agile transformation is decision making; what practices a team follows is not as important as why they’re following them.

There are 12 principles that a company needs to follow in order to facilitate Agile transformation, and how then can positively impact a business:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software: It’s pretty obvious that customers would feel more satisfied if they received working software with incremental improvements at regular intervals, rather than wait an unnecessarily long amount of time between releases.

• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage: Instead of shunning change that is inevitable, teams and companies should welcome such change and accommodate it to the best of their ability. Requests can come in at any moment, and in order to mitigate delays (and ideally, avoid it altogether) a company should effectively accommodate changing requirements.

• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale: The team should operate in short, effective bursts in order to ensure regular delivery of working software. This is perhaps the best way to ensure consumer satisfaction and appreciation.

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project: Transparency of information regarding recent innovations and developments between the development and the operations teams is critical to facilitate quick release of software. In fact, this is crucial to facilitate the effective adoption of Agile and DevOps.

• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done: It’s pretty obvious that the process of agile transformation will be much smoother if the teams that are adopting this methodology are motivated to do so, and are trusted with utilizing this approach to its full capacity.

• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation: Perhaps one of the most important reason why Agile and DevOps methodology should be adopted by software companies is the face-to-face conversations that are facilitated by the co-existence of both the development and operations teams as a single unit.

• Working software is the primary measure of progress: The final, ultimate factor that determines the effectiveness of the company and the practices it’s adopting is the timely delivery of reliable software.

• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely: One of the major positives that comes from welcoming agile transformation is the advent of a consistent development pace. By getting accustomed to this speed, the company can maintain and repeat this pace of development every cycle in order to quickly and efficiently deliver working software.

• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility: The appropriate technical skills and attention to good design will augment the company’s ability to maintain the rapid pace of developing, testing and releasing new software.

• Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential: With the increased importance to the quickness of developing and releasing new software, it’s imperative that teams don’t develop a software more than deemed necessary. They should develop just about enough in order to get the job done, until the next software cycle starts.

• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams: After Agile transformation, companies will be able to truly maximize the potential of the various teams working under them. Skill, motivation, innovation, decision-making capabilities, leadership and communication will improve under the Agile approach.

• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly: The process of switching over to the Agile and DevOps systems won’t be smooth or instantaneous. Teams needs to reflect on the processes and methods they follow and identify which ones can be improved.