The agile management approach to project development is still relatively new for many organizations, but recent studies indicate that an increasing number of organizations, particularly in the IT industry, are employing agile practices over traditional waterfall methods.
There are a number of ways in which this strategy might boost the efficiency of a project. In this post, we will review 5 practices for improving custom software development processes with agile methodology.
Table of Contents
Defining What is Agile
Agile software development is an approach to project management that emphasizes adaptability, teamwork, and constant improvement. This approach is based on the values and principles popularized in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which is the basis for many different approaches to software development.
Agile Custom Software Development Practices
Agile software development is based on a number of specific practices covering such aspects as requirements, design, modeling, coding, testing, scheduling, risk management, processes, quality, etc. Among the most well-known practices of agile software development are the following:
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) is a software development process that facilitates collaboration between customers, the development team, and the testing team.
Many of the same practices used in the specification, including behavior-driven development (BDD), example-driven development (EDD), and support-driven development, also known as story test-driven development (SDD), are included in ATDD.
All of these procedures enable clients to communicate in their own domain language and assist developers and testers in comprehending the demands of the customer prior to execution.
Agile Modeling
Agile modeling (AM) is a design and documentation methodology for software systems founded on best practices. An agile software development project may use this set of values and concepts.
This approach is more adaptable than conventional modeling techniques, which makes it more suitable in a setting that is undergoing rapid change. It is a tool utilized in agile software development.
Agile modeling is often used in tandem with other agile development methodologies, such as Scrum, extreme programming (XP), and Rational Unified Process (RUP). It is explicitly specified in the disciplined agile delivery (DAD) framework.
Agile model-driven engineering (Agile MDE), which has gained popularity in a number of application domains including online application development, banking, and automotive systems, includes agile modeling as one of its subsets.
Agile Testing
Agile testing is the practice of testing software that adheres to agile development principles. To offer the business value, the client wants at regular intervals while working at a sustainable pace, agile testing incorporates all members of a cross-functional agile team.
Testers add their specific knowledge to this process. To collect instances of acceptable and undesirable behavior and serve as a coding guide, specification by example is utilized.
Behavior-Driven Development
Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a software development methodology used in software engineering that complements agile software development methodologies by promoting cooperation between software engineers, quality assurance professionals, and client representatives.
It allows teams to codify a common understanding of how the application should behave via discussion and practical examples.
Test-driven development (TDD) gave rise to it. Behavior-driven development provides software development and management teams with common tools and a shared methodology to collaborate on software development by combining the broad methods and principles of TDD with concepts from domain-driven design and object-oriented analysis and design.
Although the practice of BDD does presuppose the use of specific software tools to help the development process, BDD is primarily a notion about how commercial interests and technical understanding should be handled in software development.
BDD is greatly aided by the use of a straightforward domain-specific language (DSL) that uses natural-language structures (such as phrases that resemble those in English) to explain the anticipated behavior and results.
DSLs with varied levels of complexity have long been used often for test scripts. Particularly when the “problem space” of the business challenge to be solved is complex, BDD is regarded as an efficient technological method.
Domain-Driven Design
Domain-driven design (DDD) is a popular software design process that focuses on modeling software to fit a domain using input from domain experts.
According to the principles of domain-driven design, it is essential for the structure and language used in software code, including class names, class methods, and class variables, to align with the specific business domain.
For instance, software that processes loan applications may contain classes such as “loan application,” “customers,” “accept the offer” and “withdraw”
Domain-driven design is based on the following objectives:
- concentrating the project’s efforts on the core domain and domain logic;
- constructing sophisticated designs using a domain model;
- beginning a collaborative effort involving technical and domain specialists to iteratively improve a conceptual model that tackles specific domain concerns.
Developers, according to domain-driven design skeptics, must use a lot of isolation and encapsulation to keep the model’s integrity and usefulness intact.
Microsoft advocates domain-driven design only for complicated domains where the model clearly aids in creating a shared knowledge of the domain, notwithstanding the advantages it offers (such as maintainability).
Conclusion
Agile software development clearly has the potential to increase project performance via numerous techniques and approaches. Agile emphasizes adaptability, collaboration, and continuous refinement, which are crucial for producing high-quality products efficiently.
ATDD enables consumers, development teams, and testers to better comprehend customer requirements prior to implementation. AM enables more flexible and adaptable modeling techniques, which are suitable for environments that undergo rapid change.
Agile testing involves all members of a cross-functional team to ensure software regularly meets business requirements. BDD encourages collaboration between software engineers, QA specialists, and client representatives, enabling a shared comprehension of how the application should operate.
DDD emphasizes modeling software to correspond to a particular domain based on the input of domain experts.
Agile software development can ultimately result in improved project performance, greater customer satisfaction, and greater adaptability to altering project requirements.
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