Why Agile is a Competitive Advantage in a Digital Age

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Atlassian, the company behind the popular project and issue tracking software JIRA, recently partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services to write a report on the successes of agile software development. The report outlines the recent shift in development trends, and how the increase in competition requires software teams to meet deadlines faster than ever. Moving to an agile workflow is the key to rapid development and release cycles, but there’s a trick to doing agile the right way. Let’s go over a few key points highlighted in the report in order to gain a better understanding of the best way to do agile.

The History of Agile

As it turns out, the agile process has been around for some time. Nearly two decades in fact. But only recently has the method of software development gained acceptance as a mainstream best practice. Although its taken a while to grow in popularity, the report from Atlassian and Harvard states that “IDC estimates the market size for agile lifecycle management tools will surpass $1 billion in worldwide revenues by 2017.” This means that agile’s popularity shows no signs of slowing down. Isn’t it time your team took notice?

So what makes agile so special? As the report outlines, agile differs from the traditional waterfall approach to programming. This waterfall method breaks down programming into several iterative steps, including planning, design development, testing, and implementation. Each step is designed to take place in succession, with no overlap occurring between the next. As you may be aware, this approach has its difficulties. Each step can take a long time to be completed, and often gets delayed due to changing business requirements. Of course the most important reason to choose agile over the waterfall approach is communication. With the traditional waterfall approach, it becomes difficult to create an environment of teamwork and collaboration, since each phase of the project needs to happen successively.

With agile, the waterfall approach is broken up into a much smaller scale, so that incremental parts of the project are can be iterated on at a much faster pace. This in turn promotes teamwork and communication, since all team members are encouraged to work with each other in order to deliver a smaller piece of the whole project.

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by Adam Roberts via SitePoint