Agile Methodologies Empowering Distributed Project Teams

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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The globalization of the business environment have paved way for customers to demand more every time. To meet the customer demands, IT giants make use of technological innovations and sit around to bring out enhanced software applications customized as per organizational requirements. Developing applications involves teams working together to complete various software modules. Software developers who work in teams for large scale projects using traditional methods learn that by the time the project gets completed, the business realities change in the fast-paced market making the project/product irrelevant for the enterprise's present day requirements.

To make the efforts more into use, software developers make use of agile methodology. This is an approach wherein teams are provided with opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the software development lifecycle. Taken as a step ahead of the traditional sequential development, this methodology helps teams through the software ...
... development lifecycle with the help of incremental, iterative work cadences known as sprints.

Unlike the waterfall methodology wherein the teams get limited chances to undertake corrective measures on their projects, the agile methodology of software development provides opportunities to the teams to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. Achieved through regular cadences or iterations the teams are supposed to put forward their increment of work. Being a series of software methodologies based on incremental and iterative development, the solutions and requirements in agile software development lifecycle evolves through collaboration between the cross-functional groups. Further, as this encourages adaptive planning and evolutionary development this methodology facilitates change management in an enterprise.

The globalized world today work on various software development projects through widely distributed teams. The agile methodologies encourages stakeholder involvement feedback, objective metrics and effective controls, facilitates effective communication across the distributed teams. Further, such process also offers transparency required for project health monitoring, risk management and tracking the progress for effective application lifecycle management. This also ensures that the applications are development as per the specifications of the customer requirement as the agile methodology allows the teams to follow an incessant and steady communication with the customer.

The technological developments such as mobile applications, embedded systems, cloud-computing processes has made product testing and quality assurance critical components for maintaining a competitive edge. Under such circumstances, organizations can benefit from agile methodologies that offer complete traceability matrix and continuous integration framework. Moreover, by enabling an enterprise to align their product to the end-user requirements this methodologies can be used to track projects precisely and identify potential risks.

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