Agile can effectively address the chaos and unpredictability of Software Projects

Crux of Agile Methodologies

Unlike other software development methods, it not only resolves the well-defined issues but also efficaciously manages the changes in requirement that occur during the development cycle. This methodology is found to be highly effective and productive in the recent progressive scenario of software development.

As per the ‘Chaos’ report of Standish Group in the year 1995, enormous amount of money was spend over various software projects in USA. Unfortunately, the success rate was just 16.2%. Rest 83.8% projects were tagged challenged or impaired. This picture of software project failure is indeed not attractive. The global software industry should be thankful to Agile software development methodology that has come in as bliss and proved to be real solutions to such chaotic problems.

How can Agile fix the chaotic and unpredictable problems?

Agile methodology is known to address the following points in order to address the chaos and unpredictability of crucial software projects:

• Involvement of valuable user
• Executive Management Support
• Setting clear project requirements
• Proper Planning to resolve issues
• Keeping realistic expectations

Well, defined processes and empirical processes are two important process control systems. Defined processes are known to provide certain set of inputs whereas the empirical processes are complex in nature. It offers unpredictable outcomes unlike the defined processes. Waterfall methodology is an example of defined process.

Software development is undeniably a complex process to be executed. It seems impossible to provide a predictable or repeated desired outcome. The reason behind this situation is a high degree of uncertainty, interaction with people as well as always altering requirements. Hence, employing the defined process is not going to make any sense for unpredictable problems. You can’t simply plan away the uncertainties of software development. It is indispensable to offer tighter controls to avoid such uncertainties. Agile is a very fluid process which can wonderfully deal with such shortcomings. It mostly depends upon random ways and interaction patterns. Scrum is considered to be the best soldier of Agile’s to tolerate chaos.

Significance of Scrum

Sound engineering discipline and technical excellence – these are the words that can explain Scrum well in the simplest manner. It has the ability to cope up with the changing environments. The most enticing part about Scrum practices is that they provide sustainable progress since it has adopted the crucial mechanism that can deal with change.

[Related: Pros and Cons of Scrum Project Management]

Scrum Sprint Planning Meeting

This meeting is aimed to figure out goals set and determine how to achieve that feat. The continuous sessions of such meetings allows to assess how things are working according to the initial plan. Eventually, the team can showcase what has been developed with persistent and sincere efforts.

Once the Sprint meeting is done, the team has sufficient information in order to estimate the overall performance and put in best efforts for better productivity.

In a nutshell, this leading Agile methodology enables the project development team to learn, adapt, improve, and deal, be it good or bad.

• Sprint* - it can be considered as a time span which lets the entire team to get self-organized and resolve the crucial problems.

Conclusion

It won’t be wrong to call Scrum the best Agile implementation available when it comes to handle chaotic and unpredictable software development problems. Certified Scrum master training is simple and practical. It is getting well-appreciated as it offers complete visibility to the overall progress of the team as well as of the project.