Agile Product Development
Approach
Our approach to Agile development is built upon the expectation that our clients’ requirements are likely to change over the course of taking a project from inception to completion.
Defining hard and fast deliverables at the outset neglects to take in factors such as marketplace changes, behavioural shifts, competitor actions or just simply learning new things about the project as it develops.
Using project management tools and Sprint meetings, we put in place a constant communication flow between our design/development teams, our project managers (or Product Owners) and our clients. As well as having a constant visual guide to where the project is, this also helps to ensure all voices can be heard and critical feedback can be quickly directed to the right place.
Encapsulating this ethos of communication and linking it to an iterative design and development cycle, means the project can evolve alongside the ideas of the client. Clients and end users can see and interactive with designs using tools such as In-Vision to give early access for feedback and to test ideas.
Once these ideas have been approved we run short-scale development cycles so that each element of the project can be quickly prototyped to see if the idea works in practice, under real-life conditions.
Unlike outdated development cycles new requirements can be fed into the process and areas that aren’t working can be changed and refined until they meet the goals of the objectives.
Methodology
The methodology we use is based on a DSDM Agile method, encompassing the following principles:
- Focus on the business need
- Deliver on time
- Collaborate
- Never compromise quality
- Build incrementally from firm foundations
- Develop iteratively
- Communicate continuously and clearly
- Demonstrate control
but we adopt many elements of Scrum to facilitate this process.
We keep teams small and run informal Scrum meetings on a daily basis with more formal Sprint reviews weekly.
Clients are encouraged to be involved on a weekly basis either in dialogue with the heads of teams or through their assigned Project Manager.
The diagram below shows how our process closely mirrors that of a Scrum process, with only minor changes.