The Future of Agile Development: Experts Share Their 2014 Predictions

Agile development has been undergoing some major changes these past years. Concept of value teams and application of Agile methods for the large organizations threaten to change the landscape as the next big thing in Agile development.

With the growth in various technologies and solutions, it’s imperative to stay ahead of the curve and identify future trends in this space. We asked Ciklum Consulting experts to share their predictions on the future of Agile development and the ways in which it will impact software development processes and practices in 2014. 

More on The Value Teams conceptValue teams as new team composition on a product level

The benefit of value team is that it has everyone and everything to identify, prioritize and slice business value increments, and to make decisions about functionality and prepare the information needed by the delivery team(s) to deliver a feature. These components are important to build a value team:

• Team structure is important for collaboration. It needs to be constantly checked and updated.
• Roles and responsibilities of the team members to be set up efficiently to provide the team enough autonomy where they can work and do their jobs with full commitment and confidence.
• Team spirit and motivation. It means that management should be involved in the establishment of the team vision and goal. Management must set a clear vision to which the team can jointly work towards together.
• Facilitation is aimed to lead team members through processes toward agreed-upon outcomes in a manner that encourages participation, ownership and creativity from all involved.
• Value teams are cross functional teams of a Product Owner, Scrum/Agile Master, Developers and Testers and others resources that are needed to be fully capable of defining, building and testing a growth of customer value.

Distributed Agile development

Agile typically promotes co-location, but more and more teams are working in a distributed manner. Therefore, Agile teams are not located in one place now. It is always good to see Pros and Cons before taking the decision to follow the trend.

Image sourced from the presentation of Ahmed Sidky

PROS

• adjustments on a way that increases probability to hit the target;
• involvement of developers in product development;
• advanced working planning across multiple teams;
• modern tools and applications allow distributed teams to
• communicate efficiently, meanwhile face-to-face meetings still
• required;
• increase time to market with cost reduction.

CONS

• with a distributed team there could be a challenge to have all the
• team members involved and committed accordingly;
• chaos due to the lack of Agile processes applied and complexity
• with implementation;
• different motivational factors in the separate locations;
• cultural difference, language barrier.

Increasing role of DevOps in existing organizations

Without a doubt, the traditional role of IT is changing. Traditionally IT were decisions-makers about all kinds of things, they ruled. Today the end user is placing all kinds of demands on IT. This caused an emergency of DevOps culture growth. The role of DevOps is to bridge the gap between development and operations, supercharging the investments to achieve a common goal.

Role of DevOps is becoming more important in large scale enteprises, who are trying to resolve conflict of interest between development and operation departments. If you really care about time to market, then DevOps needs to be in your organization. DevOps role is an important part of Agile operations, including functions of automation building, continuous deployment, monitoring etc. By implementing DevOps, the enterprise changes a way of working, but also a state of mind, a culture. DevOps is an enabler and it defines how much can be done—and in how much time.

Agile is moving into the enterprise. As organizations realize the need of adaptation of Agile methods and find the current popular ones lacking, people will rethink approaches and look for what works better.

Hubert Smits : “Let it happen, don’t prescribe. Motivate, lead, hire the best. Then let the best be their best”.

What are your predictions on the future of Agile development? Share them in the comment section below.

Additional reading:

How to DevOps Your Software Project? Download the eBook.

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