Software development teams have gone through the same processes for years. Talk to some users, maybe write a spec, write code, maybe toss the product over to a quality assurance team, and hope that it works. If the team is lucky, it just might. More often, however, software projects end up costing more than planned, not meeting expectations, and frustrating both the team and the people the software was intended to help.

Project failures are most commonly attributed to lack of communication, lack of accurate prioritization of features and tasks, and inadequate programming practices that lead to products that are difficult to manage and extend. Problems on software projects are rarely attributed to the technology being used, and nearly always on the process and practices being used to manage the technology.

Here at AgileThought, we have found that introducing agile development processes, coupled with solid development engineering practices, will reduce the time-to-market for a new product, and stabilize the maintenance cycle for an existing product.

AgileThought promotes Scrum as the development methodology of choice. Based on processes developed at Toyota in the 1980’s, Scrum is a lightweight, iterative process that increases productivity and reduces the time to benefits. Scrum prescribes a cyclical process that defines daily communication practices, and periodic review and planning sessions. Scrum is being successfully adopted by many organizations, large and small, all over the world.

Coupled with Scrum, the development practices of automated testing, automated software builds, and continuous integration round out the process suite. Automated testing allows for immediate feedback to developers to know when a problem exists. Automated build processes help ensure that at any given point in time a working version of the product exists. Continuous integration is a practice that ties automated build processes, automated testing, and other metrics such as static code analysis and coding standard rules into a cohesive package that allows development team members to know the state of their product at all times.

We have been helping our clients achieve lower total cost of ownership, faster time to market, and more stable, predictable development cycles. Let us work with your organization to successfully adopt these processes and practices.