How to Measure the Success of your Agile Initiatives

Agile is known to be a process that greatly enhances an organizations’ capacity and capability in the areas of both software development and testing. Properly implemented, it provides a lot of business-critical benefits to organizations. It helps organizations successfully tackle challenges related to development costs, predictability, and scope.

As per the 10th Annual State of Agile Report by VersionOne, following are some statistics explaining the measures used to assess the success of Agile initiatives in organizations:

The following points briefly describe what a few of these measures involve:

1. On-time delivery and Customer/user satisfaction: A proper, well thought adoption of Agile software development practices, helps delivering on time business-critical solutions that are built as per the specific demands of the clients. Agile also provides an environment wherein feedback and inputs can be taken at any stage, thereby improving the solution at every step. Add to it the multifarious forms of testing such as functional, performance, or usability, and you will always have clients and customers who are greatly satisfied with your services.
2. Quality of Software Application: Agile testing requires chunking a larger piece of project/code into smaller and more manageable parts. This helps developers provide complete focus on smaller parts of code, which leads to improvements in the overall quality, robustness, and testing of the software application. Because Agile encourages phased development cycles, it promotes frequent builds, which makes it necessary to conduct more tests and reviews for each iteration. This in turn leads to early identification of issues that can be fixed (- at a much lesser cost), thereby improving the quality of the software.
3. Business value: Every organization talks about ‘Business value’, but very few really are able to define as to what they mean by it. To be measured accurately, business value requires defining specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based business objectives that are properly aligned with the strategies being used. Achieving such goals thus requires a seamless working environment of people, process and technology. An Agile-DevOps combination helps provide an environment where existing principles and practices work cohesively to help in growing the business value. Our teams work in perfect harmony with the clients to understand their needs and priorities and thus provide the best value to their business.
4. Productivity: In an Agile-based process you need to ensure that the people working on any given task are people who are best suited to perform it. Additionally, Agile encourages an atmosphere where it is the resultant product that gets critiqued rather than people being criticized. Both practices if ensured will definitely help increase the overall productivity of the team as a whole, and the organization will succeed in its goals.
5. Process improvement: Agile, as a process, is a very team focussed approach. A lot of organization’s fail because they do not have proper processes in place – whether development, or testing of software. Agile processes, even as early as in the originally created Agile manifesto, laid a lot of emphasis on creating a team-based culture. As per the same, the quality of a resulting software is the responsibility of the whole team rather than a single individual. Hence, the process must be such that promotes a lot of communication and shared responsibilities. For example, during testing, any defect found by anyone at any given point of time must be shared with the developer immediately, so that the same may be fixed.

Cigniti Technologies takes great pride in being a Global Leader in Independent Software Testing Services. We apply the best practices and initiatives of Agile and DevOps to create a culture of Shift Left in our organization that help us provide the best business benefits to our clients. For knowing more about our services, drop a line to contact@cigniti.com.