Agile Development Software Overview
What is Agile Development Software?
Agile development tools support methodologies like Extreme Programming and Scrum. These aid developers in focusing on quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements.
This type of software advocates very short development cycles or “sprints” to improve productivity. This also allows for feedback at every stage of the process from either the customer/user, or a user representative like a product-marketing manager. Thier job is to understand market requirements in detail.
Other elements of the process are pair programming. This means developers work together in teams of two and conduct very extensive code review and unit testing. One fundamental guideline throughout the process is that the code should be the simplest possible to deliver the required functionality and features.
Agile Development Software Features & Capabilities
Agile development products are designed to support the agile process with varying sets of features, which often include:
- Release planning to manage multiple teams with a sharable release planning dashboard
- Development and test sandboxes
- Requirements management to track requirements backlog, and the ability to break high-level features down into specific functional requirements and map them to releases
- Iteration or sprint management balancing commitments against team velocity
Agile Development Software approaches software development that first emerged in the late 1980s as a lightweight development methodology to replace the waterfall approach. Waterfall had dominated product development projects until that time.
The well-known problem with waterfall methodologies is that they are sequential (complete one thing before moving on to the next step). They can run for a long time before any feedback is allowed to enter the process from outside. The result is often extremely long development cycles that can result in products that are substantially different from what was originally wanted. This can often have serious usability shortcomings, which cannot easily be fixed.
The Agile Manifesto
The early creators of agile methodologies outline the main principles in a manifesto in 2001. The 12 principles are a clear summary of the approach beginning with:
1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of useful software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
Pricing Information
Agile development Software spans a very broad range of product types from simple project tracking software to full-scale development environments. Pricing varies greatly across the category.
