Why many Organizations now a days adopting agile

[sumeet gupta]

Hi All,
What are the features of agile which enable us to migrate legacy applications to agile as now a days many organizations are adopting agile.

Thanks,
Sumeet Gupta
[ September 09, 2008: Message edited by: sumeet gupta ]

[kerem oge]

I think because many companies realised that in a project process something like "rules" needed. Agile offers many ways to finish this process in time and quite complete.

[Ilja Preuss]

This is a nice 5 minute video on why Agile Software Development pays.

[Vijay Dafal]

Yes, the organizations want to show the deliverables which is very much visible to their clients. Such organizations are adopting Agile.

[sumeet gupta]

Hi All,

Can anyone tell me briefly about advantages of adopting agile as i need to know what agile exactly offer to us??

Thanks
Sumeet

[Amr Elssamadisy]

It really depends on which practices you use. Some of the potential benefits are:

faster time to market
higher quality
reduced cost of maintenance
ability to respond to customer change quickly
increased product lifetime

Check out chapter 5 of the book which is available for free download - please see my post on reviews and resources.

[Ganesh Bhambure]

It really depends on which practices you use. Some of the potential benefits are:

faster time to market
higher quality
reduced cost of maintenance
ability to respond to customer change quickly
increased product lifetime

Hi

But I am not clear with last one.
How would you say that it increased product lifetime.

Will you explain with example or comparison.
Any link exploring about this ?


Thanks
Ganesh
[ September 09, 2008: Message edited by: Ganesh Bhambure ]

[Katrina Owen]

Originally posted by Ganesh Bhambure:

How would you say that it increased product lifetime.

I think the basic idea is that a product which
- has less bugs
- takes less time to change
- costs less to develop and maintain
can live longer, be sold longer, be of use longer.

When software gets too expensive to maintain, the product either has to be rewritten, refactored, or the product dies. Sometimes, the company dies with it.

[Ganesh Bhambure]

When software gets too expensive to maintain, the product either has to be rewritten, refactored, or the product dies. Sometimes, the company dies with it.

Yes , that's true, I agree.
But you are talking in General.
but I am expecting more specific with respect to agile.

Hope , I am not asking odd one
[ September 10, 2008: Message edited by: Ganesh Bhambure ]

[Ilja Preuss]

Ganesh, take a look at the video I linked to above.

The most important reason that software systems die is that when they get changed, traditionally the code and design degrades. That way, changes become harder and more costly all the time. And because the environment it is used in changes, and with it the requirements, the software becomes less and less useful.

Agile has a strong focus on the internal quality of the systems produced, and on long term sustainability. Agile practices such as extensive automated testing and refactoring allow to keep the costs of change low.

I have seen a project that was becoming harder and harder to change to be revived by the Agile practices mentioned above. It is now getting easier and easier (and therefore less and less costly) to change the system, and to incorporate new features. I would even say that this has saved the company.

[Amr Elssamadisy]

Hi Sumeet,

So you asked me to dig a little more deeply with respects to increasing product lifetime, ok:

1) Having an automated test suite that includes unit tests built by the original team helps the maintenance team make changes and not worry about breaking things elsewhere because the tests will tell. This keeps us from making the band-aid fixes we always make without tests and degrading the design and architecture over time. This also enable refactoring of designs as new requirements come in and also prevents degradation of the design and architecture.

2) Having automated functional/acceptance tests act as much better requirements than traditional requirements because they are ALWAYS up to date. How many maitainence projects have we seen where the documentation no longer accuratley represents the software?

3) Pair programming is a form of continuous code reviews. Code reviews have been empirically proven to increase the quality of design. Better quality design, means longer lasting applications.

4) Evocative documents are much more valuable than representational documents in communicating information.

There are a few more practices, but I hope you get the idea. These practices increase the quality of design and allow that design to change over time to keep up with changing requirements instead of degrade over time. Other practices improve communication and transfer of knowledge so we don't end up with a maintenance team that knows very little of the big picture.

[sumeet gupta]

Thanks Amr for your valuable time and explanation that will definitely help us to understand agile better.

Sumeet

[Ganesh Bhambure]

Hi Ilja,

Ganesh, take a look at the video I linked to above.

That really good video. that help's me to explain more.
Thank You Very Much.

[Ganesh Bhambure]

Hi Amr,

Hi Sumeet,

So you asked me to dig a little more deeply with respects to increasing product lifetime, ok:

Actually that was my query.that's fine.
but I got some what clear idea from your explanation.
Automated test suite
Automated functional/acceptance tests
Pair programming
Evocative documents
these feature really makes design very strong.
So now it time for me to adopt agile technology ASAP.

Thank You
Ganesh

[Paras Jain]

How would you say that it increased product lifetime.

To add to the explanations above, I would like to add one more point.

In the traditional projects, like in waterfall model, by the time the project is completes, and finishes all the testing cycles and finally delivered in production, it is already too late. The requirements become obsolete, technologies become old or simply the market is changed. So the product will have to retire soon. Therefore the effective product lifetime is less.

Normally I have seen that by the time all the SDLC are completed 1.5-2 years are gone.

[Amr Elssamadisy]

Actually that was my query.that's fine.
but I got some what clear idea from your explanation.

Sorry Ganesh

[Ganesh Bhambure]

Sorry Ganesh

Hi Amr,

You are WELCOME!!
Actually no need to say sorry about that.

I am feeling great to discuss with you about such nice technolgy.

Thank You
Ganesh

[Ganesh Bhambure]

Hi Paras,

In the traditional projects, like in waterfall model, by the time the project is completes, and finishes all the testing cycles and finally delivered in production, it is already too late. The requirements become obsolete, technologies become old or simply the market is changed. So the product will have to retire soon. Therefore the effective product lifetime is less.

Do you mean to say Big product/project having long period of SDLC having less lifetime ?
But I think it's not true always.

SDLC Time is also factor affecting projet life time but other factors are also having vital role in it.

Thanks
Ganesh