The agile methodology isn’t just a buzzword anymore. It’s a practice that is here to stay, and it’s the way of life for many organization owners and software development team leaders. If you plan to integrate agile practices in your organization, you must know the latest agile trends to keep you and your team up to speed.
Today, I’m here to talk about agile development trends that you and your organization should be aware of. But how good are these trends, and how will they impact your organization?
Impact of Agile Trends On Your Organization
When you’re following all the agile product development trends, you ensure that the market will always receive a high-quality product that can raise customer satisfaction.
When agile methodology practices are implemented correctly, the organization can even beat born-agile settlements in terms of productivity.
10 Agile Trends That You Should Focus On
Now that you know how important following the trends in agile is, let’s learn the top 10 trends of the agile culture that can help you sustain 2023 and beyond.
1. Agile Training
There are agile workshops that take away the exhaustion of 4-5 days of traditional classroom training. Instead, they focus on the skillset of the individuals, and by the time the workshop finishes, each team member can achieve a cohesive understanding of the agile roadmap.
These workshops increase the entire team’s capabilities to create a fully functional product that takes less time to market and has a complete product-market fit.
2. Rapid Feedback
There are quite a few factors that can cause the outcome to deviate from the original plan:
- Constantly changing working conditions
- New and updated demands
- Ever-changing quality standards and requirements
In such situations, immediate input should receive more focus than the anticipated outcome.
Rapid feedback helps the agile teams understand the exact progress of the project while creating a friendly environment to provide said feedback. The rest of the team can act on this user feedback and continue improving the product throughout different project phases.
3. Embracing The Agile Spirit
It’s not just about using agile as a buzzword when talking to sound trendy. It’s about embracing the spirit of what it takes to be an Agile corporation while harboring an Agile team that understands and acts on the Agile manifesto.
Many agencies and organizations twist the agile approach while trying to customize it, but it just doesn’t work. While being tougher to adapt, true agile can bring any agency the best amount of success.
4. Leveraging Cloud-Based Solutions
Cloud-based solutions can enable faster coding, testing, and releases, which suits the agile methodology. Many agile teams are leveraging the fast-paced facilities of cloud-based solutions to have the edge over their competitors.
Modern agile teams prefer serverless computing for the following benefits:
- Higher Quality Products
- Better User Experience
- Better Support
- Greater Agility
- Speed Testing Programming Code For Bugs
- Faster Market Responsiveness
- Reduced Resources & Operational Costs
- Reduced Development Time
- Higher Customer Satisfaction
5. Focusing On Business Values
Modern agile culture focuses more on improving the business value it presents.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
-Peter Drucker
Multiple metrics can lag, and modern agile focuses on accurate measurement of all these metrics and acting on improving them. These metrics are used to identify user stories and act on them accordingly.
6. Design Thinking For Business Agility
Design thinking focuses on creating more customer-centric products. The design thinking approach helps the development team understand the customer journey from a more humane perspective.
With this approach, the developers can relate more to the needs of the users and design a product based on feedback with a better understanding of the customer’s pain.
Both agile principles and architecture have a lot in common, and combining them can bring forth powerful products that can resonate with users on a larger level.
With products designed for real users, developers can gather tons of customer feedback that enables streamlining of prototyping and testing of the product. This way, the business agility overall increases as well.
The design-centric approach can help project management professionals maintain agile practices and business agility while supporting the idea of customer collaboration.
7. Machine Learning Supporting Agile
While agile software development goes on in full swing, a lot of requirement analysis and other theoretical work still have to be done manually. In the data analysis phase for larger projects, automation and AI learning can speed things up significantly.
Here are the additional benefits that AI can add to Agile:
- Acceleration of the Development Process
- Bug Removal While Ensuring Higher Functionality
- Data Insights With Higher Accuracy
8. Rise of Scaled Agile Framework
An agile framework isn’t longer limited to one person or team. Modern agile methods have evolved far beyond that, and the agile methodology can impact multiple sections across an organization.
Agencies are leaning towards this newfound scalable business process known as SAFe (Safe Agile Framework) for higher efficiency. With this framework, business operations are setting short-term goals for the teams to achieve, increasing the overall efficiency of cross-functional teams.
The SAFe was announced as the top-scaled agile methodology last year, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
9. Agile & DevOps
As we all know, DevOps isn’t a foreign concept anymore. It’s a combination of software development with IT operations. See how similar it is to agile project management?
DevOps and Agile go together like peanut butter and jelly, and modern agencies are doubling down on it to increase their overall productivity with this combo.
When you combine the continuous deliveries of software mixed with constant testing for perfection, you are bound to achieve success with great products within a shorter period.
10. Agile Beyond Software Development
Agile is not just seen as a faster method for results anymore. Agile is a mindset, belief, and culture that can improve an organization’s functionalities in every department throughout the project teams.
Even now, the complete potential of this methodology hasn’t been unlocked. But different organizations see enough improvements by implementing the methodology in different departments, and they believe it’s not just the biggest trend; it’s far beyond that.
To Wrap It All Up
Though most trends keep the attention of the masses for a shorter duration, trends of the agile methodology aren’t going away anytime soon and will only continue to improve.
For the betterment of your organization and its overall output, you should try your best to adapt to these trends as well. Best of luck!
Agile trends are updates and improvements of the agile methodology that more and more organizations are adapting.
Agile methodology and practices can be applied to any industry, but it has proven to be exceptionally beneficial for the software development industry.
While they have similarities in terms of operation, Agile and DevOps are not the same.
SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) works by implementing agile practices in multiple departments of the same organization instead of just one team.
Design thinking can give product developers a unique perspective toward the customers’ needs, which can help them design a product that feels in touch with the customers.
