Task 3 : How Agile software development & Scrum can improve our products and make the process

more efficient? Agile software development is a method based on iterative and incremental development, where it promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle. Agile software development methods are team-oriented and might cause the end product has poor quality and stands against the very nature of the agile manifesto, which tries to ensure high quality in each iteration of a products development. If a team develops the product, errors made by one member are discovered by others and fixed. Each member has a specific role. Some may even have passive roles, as their only task is to listen, observe or moderate. Therefore, agile methodologies were designed and work best with teams that are usually larger than three or four members but adjustments can be made. Despite the fact that it is really hard to successfully apply agile methods to developers working alone, some tweaks can be made to certain methods and therefore use them to improve our own productivity and work flow. Agile methods grew out of the real-life project experiences of leading software professionals who had experienced the challenges and limitations of traditional waterfall development on project after project. The approach promoted by agile development is in direct response to the issue associated with traditional software development, both in terms of overall philosophy as well as specific processes. Agile development offers a framework for helping teams, given a constantly evolving functional and technical landscape, and maintain a focus on the rapid delivery of business value. As a result of this focus and its associated benefits, organizations are capable of significantly reducing the overall risk associated with software development. In particular, agile development accelerates the delivery of initial business value, and through a process of continuous planning and feedback, is able to ensure that value is continuing to be maximized throughout the development process. As a result of this iterative planning and feedback loop, teams are able to continuously align the delivered software with desired business needs, easily adapting to changing requirements throughout the process. By measuring and evaluating status based on the undeniable truth of working, testing software, much more accurate visibility into the actual progress of projects is available. Finally, at the conclusion of a project is
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a software system that much better addresses the business and customer needs. By delivering working, tested, deployable software on an incremental reducing project risk. On the other hand, Scrum is a lightweight process framework for agile development, and the most widely-used one. Scrum is an iterative framework that was designed to serve as a management tool for software development projects and contains a set of practices and three predefined roles. The project manager is usually the Scrum master and maintains the processes. Theres also the product owner, or someone who represents the client and a team of developers. So in summary, there are three Scrum roles, they are Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team. Scrum uses sprint periods of two to four weeks during which a potentially releasable product increment is developed. The features that are implemented during a sprint are chosen from a set of high-level requirements needed to be done. Which of these requirements go into a sprint is decided at the beginning of the phase. The product owner or the client informs the development team about the items in the requirements list that must be completed first. The team than estimates how many of these items can be completed during the next sprint. An important issue with Scrum is that, during a sprint, requirements of that specific sprint cannot be changed. This ensures that the development team is focused on its tasks and doesnt get distracted. Scrum is unique because it introduced the idea of empirical process control, which means it uses the real-world progress of a project to plan and schedule releases. A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project, the customers can modify based on what they want or need. These modifications are introduced to the project development only between sprints. Scrum requires daily meetings. Scrum is most often used to manage complex software and product development, using iterative and incremental practices. Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces time to benefits relative to classic "waterfall" processes. Scrum processes enable organizations to adjust smoothly to rapidly-changing requirements, and produce a product that meets evolving business goals. Scrum process benefits the organization by helping it to increase the quality of the deliverables, cope better with change, provide better estimates while spending less time creating them, and be more in control of the project schedule and state. As a result, Scrum projects achieve higher customer satisfaction rates.
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basis,

agile development

delivers increased value, visibility, and adaptability much earlier in the life cycle, significantly