Benefits

Typical benefits that you will see when you move to or improve an Agile process are:

Improved Quality & Lower Defects

  • Whole team (BA, dev and QA) working together during the iteration reduces defects.
  • Acceptance tests created early by BA/QA reduces defects.
  • Unit testing reduces defects.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

  • Good visibility and control through open process framework provides management with better information to make better choices about what to invest in and delivery timelines.
  • Direct product management involvement leads to better choices about what to work on.
  • Iteration review allows for early identification of usability, missing requirements and better understanding of system evolution.
  • Iterative delivery allows system to evolve as it is built.

Faster time-to-market

  • Iterative delivery and just-in-time requirements allow reduces time between idea generation and delivery of working software.
  • Rolling-wave adaptive planning allows for course corrections and injection of high-value features.
  • Lean manufacturing principles (that apply to software) have a long track record of success.

Improved productivity

  • Team rooms provide very large boost in productivity and focus.  Some reports document 2x.
  • Engineering best practices (unit test, automated testing, design alternatives, continuous integration, delayed commitment) reduces wasted work.
  • Dedicated team enables better focus on iteration goals (no changes in focus or priority).
  • Iteration retrospective provides regular opportunity to improve productivity.
  • Self-organizing team allows improved work distribution.

Cost Savings

  • Improved productivity as above.
  • Less work is wasted fixing avoidable defects
  • Reduced maintenance costs: Systems built with evolutionary design tend to be simpler with less code.  Pair programming accelerates this benefit.

Some Survey Results


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