Hey guys I’m trying to come up with the perfect concise way of explaining what agile methodology is when explaining it to my friends. Every time I do, I feel like I ramble on and on and what it’s principles and values are without actually understanding what they are. My manager also says this too.
In: Technology
Agile is a project management philosophy that’s useful when project scope and costs bug unknows. Agile is best defined in contrast to more traditional project management philosophies like “waterfall”. A waterfall plan looks like this:
– Plan your product, and figure out what’s going to cost to make
– Build your product
– Deliver your product to the customer
This works great if your customer knows exactly what they want, how to do it, and how much things are going to cost. So if you’ve done this kind of thing before, Waterfall is probably the right approach. The problem with this is it doesn’t respond well to unknowns and change. What if the customer decides they want something slightly different halfway through the building process? What if costs aren’t what you thought? What if the customer is unhappy with the final product? Maybe they thought it was going to look different. Agile looks like this:
– Plan part of your product to get it working at the bare minimum
– Build it
– Deliver it to your customer
– Get customer feedback
– Use that to plan next stage of improvement process.
– Repeat
This can work really well for certain products. It allows your customer to be directly involved with the process. The key here is that each improvement cycle is fast, so if something isn’t working, resources and time waste is kept to a minimum (this is the “fail fast” mentality) .
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