Agile Development assisting in the rapid delivery of high quality software

I believe that the main principles of Agile Development can

• Help application development projects bring practical benefits on today’s challenging business environment.
• Fit very well with the user centered design approach.

In particular I would like to focus on the principle of iterations. An iteration can be considered as a specific set of application/website improvements or features that have been designed, developed and tested over a specific short time-frame. Such an iteration developed using Agile principles differs from a prototype in that the application/website improvements are a working piece of the final desired set of improvements.

Adopting the iteration principle with the resultant focus on a distinct and defined set of  features when developing an application/website can bring a number of benefits to the project including;

• Better software quality
• Improved  team communications between designers, developers, testers and users

If the project needs to change direction to respond to a changing business environment, short iterations provide the project team with the option to respond quickly to current circumstances. As opposed to being ‘anchored’ to a sequential design and development process and a pre-determined project plan that may be going of sync with the current business needs.

Another benefit of incorporating the iterations principle as a team progresses a website design project, is the leveraging of the release and sign-off phase of each iteration to provide a checkpoint for users, designers, developers and sponsors to compare and validate the overall project direction and design to ensure that the project is pursuing the appropriate business objectives.

Agile development and user centered design provide methodologies to articulate and deliver new features to a website, now all that is needed is for the project manager to facilitate the project team to perform.