What is Agile?
Agile software development is a bunch of software development techniques or procedures which are based on iterative development, where the requirements and solutions emerge through the association of self-organizing cross-functional teams.
The Agile methods or processes generally encourages a controlled project management process that promotes frequent inspection and adaptation. It also encourages a leadership philosophy that promotes teamwork. Agile methods or agile processes also promotes self-organization and accountability along with a set of best practices in engineering which are determined to enable the delivery of a very good quality software in a quick time. In addition, it supports a business approach that adjusts the development with the objectives of an organization along with the requirements of the customers.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a widely used handy framework for Agile software development. The Scrum process is different from any other process in Agile in terms of concepts and practices splitted into three classes - Roles, Artifacts and Time Boxes. Scrum is most commonly and frequently used for managing complicated software development and product development using incremental and iterative practices. Scrum helps in significant rise in productivity and reduction in time to benefits as compared to the traditional waterfall processes.
Scrum processes helps the companies to easily adapt to requirements that are changing rapidly, and create a product that matches the business objectives that are emerging fast. An Agile Scrum process provides benefits to the company by helping it in improving the quality of their products, adapting to the rapid changing requirements and also creating and providing the estimates quickly. Moreover, it helps the company to have a complete control on the schedule and state of the project.
What are the benefits of Agile?
Agile has a lot of benefits for each crucial part of the organization. The benefits are to - as discussed here.
1. Customer
Agile helps the vendor to create some quality features and also taking a very short duration as compared to the traditional “waterfall” processes. This makes the customer feel that the vendor is timely responding to the development requests and delivering the product at an very fast rate.
2. Vendors
Agile helps the vendors to focus more on the development of high quality features, thus reducing the wastage of development efforts. In addition, the development time is fairly less as compared to the waterfall processes because of the reduced overhead and enhanced efficiency. This makes the customer more contented and establishes a long term business relationship with the customer, eventually improving customer references as well.
3. Development Teams
Scrum framework helps the development team members to minimize the the work that will be of no use. For instance, writing specifications or other artifacts. This helps the members of the development teams to focus more on building applications, which means that the development team will have their preferred work and will enjoy working. Also, they will work well because they are aware that their work is valued it will be utilized as the needs have been selected accordingly to increase value to customers.
4. Product Managers
Scrum helps the product managers, who are considered to be the product owners. It is the responsibility of the product managers to make their customers delighted and satisfied. For that, the managers have to make sure that the development work is strictly aligned with the requirements of the customer. This alignment is made easier by Scrum which provides frequent opportunities to again set the priority of work to make sure that the delivery of the value is maximum.
5. Project Managers
Scrum helps the project managers as well. The project managers are technically the scrum masters who are responsible for managing project development and ensuring delivery of the project within the specified deadline. Scrum makes the planning and tracking more easy and concrete in comparison of the traditional waterfall processes. The focus on task-level tracking, the Burndown Charts showing the daily progress of the project, along with the day to day Scrum meetings, all together provide a tremendous awareness of the state of the project at all times to the Project Manager. This awareness is very crucial in order to monitor the project, identify and address to the issues instantly.
6. PMOs and C-Level Executives
Scrum helps the external stakeholders like C - Level Executives and other personnel in the project management office by providing high visibility into the state of a development project on a day to day basis. These external stakeholders can make use of this visibility in effectively planning and adjusting their strategies based on concrete information and less conjecture.
Why Scrum is needed in today’s marketplace?
As far as the software project development is concerned, the development cycles encounters various uncertainties in terms of allocation of resources, optimization of costs and above all, the sudden change in the customer requirements. These uncertainties become more worse due to the market competition. For instance, a rival company introduces a new product in the market. So, all these uncertainties connive to impede projects and minimize the usefulness of the new products unless they become completely obsolete and sink a company’s bottom line.
Scrum - A solution to lead the race
The issues highlighted above brought together the consultants and professionals from different everywhere to build a better approach to the development of solutions. The traditional waterfall method for developing products gave way to alliteration and resulted in products that were illogical and irrelevant to the customers and developers. Therefore, to handle these issues and keep pace with changes in technology, Scrum was developed.
Future of Agile Scrum
Our daily life seems to be completely revolving around softwares, we use software to know the weather outside, while traveling to a new place we are using GPS navigator, to interact with others, we use softwares like Google Duo, Skype, imo etc. Therefore, for even a small thing we are looking at software. Or, we can say that we have a greater intimacy with electronic gadgets than our loved ones.
Software industry is growing by leaps and bounds, and only a limited number of people knows the technical know-hows of writing a quality software. The advent of agile methodology is considered the renaissance of software development, however the impact couldn’t be massive because of the lack of skilled professionals. The demand of scrum masters is increasing day by day, and there is a shortage of certified scrum masters in the industry, who can implement scrum. However, there are only a few people who are actually are fairly skilled, and have in depth knowledge about this role, and can actually implement it. Companies like Dell, IBM, HP, and other leading MNCs are desperately looking for Scrum masters. In addition, as per payscale.com says that the average salary for the Agile and Scrum professionals is in the range of $107,000 and $126,000.