With the rapid change in customer needs, technology design and development have changed. Agile development has adopted an iterative approach for the system development lifecycle. It is a collective developmental method that improves the software continuously. A group of developers focuses on developing the software quickly using a particular method.
The agile method helps you to deliver a better quality product to your customer in a shorter time period. The agile process adapts to changes and breaks the whole project into smaller segments. Read on to understand how the agile system development lifecycle works.
Stages of Agile Lifecycle
The Agile software development lifecycle has 5 stages. They are project initiation, planning, design, production, and retirement. Let’s take a closer look at all the stages.
Project Initiation
Project initiation is the first stage of the agile system development lifecycle. This stage is also known as project inception. At this stage, you visualize and discuss the objective of the project. This does not include every detail rather it is an overall feasibility discussion of the project.
You allocate time, resources, work, and identify your team members for different operations of the project. Another important factor is to consider the stock of resources for economic feasibility.
Planning
Planning includes every detail of the project from inception to retirement. This is the estimation of different operations of the project in terms of time, resources, team members in action. In the planning stage, developers discuss the product or feature they are going to offer to the end-user. How the product is in the minds of the users.
Defining the end-user, their requirements, and focusing on the product requirement are the crucial parts of the planning stage. The whole to come together to discuss the requirement of the end-user. They come up with a backlog at the story level.
At this stage, the product of the business is considered from a larger context. And this will estimate how viable the project is from an operational and financial view. The crucial part is to estimate the risk and set the short term goals with an initial plan. Your planning is complete when you are ready with the backlog and sort different operations of the project on a priority basis.
Development
This is the stage where all the operations of the project actually come into existence. After the planning stage, you are ready with the requirements from product owners, the real work starts now. The Agile software development process builds a high-quality product in incremental phases or sprints or iterations.
At the initial phase, developers build a usable product with minimum functionalities. This is not the final version of the product, it gets revised at the subsequent phases. Let’s look at the different iterations of the product development cycle.
Each cycle passes through certain operational steps, you need to follow them for creating a high-quality product at the end of each sprint. First of all, ensuring collaboration with all the stakeholders. Secondly, following the style guidelines and coding practices, you need to maintain quality. As the stakeholders have control over the project, you need to keep in alignment with the priorities set by them. Next, delivering the product at each sprint of the development lifecycle. Testing the product at the end of each iteration.
After the completion of the total number of iterations, the product is ready for production. But before that, the product is undergoing final testing. The final test includes a quality assurance check and bug-finding. In the final test, the product involves a certain end-user for the testing of the product, unlike the iteration test.
Production
Once the final test of the product has been completed and is used by end-users, it is now taken for production. It is essential to rectify the mistakes which are missed in testing. There must be a close discussion between the support team and the production team for improvements.
After this production stage, the product is ready to be retired. That means it is also called the end of life of the product and there is no further production of that particular product.
Retirement
Retirement is the final stage of the life cycle of the Agile system. At this stage, the product is no longer produced. There are a number of reasons behind this. There are, above all, two main reasons why a product is withdrawn. The most important reason is that there is a newer release for the current model. In some cases, the product is no longer manufactured because it does not fit into the current business model and is phased out.
Now the five stages of the Agile system development lifecycle have been explained in detail. However, there are still many developers who prefer the Waterfall method due to its predictability. But the Agile system delivers a high-quality product than the Waterfall method.
Conclusion
Adopting the Agile process is difficult for many organizations, because of limited time or money. However, the Agile process is widespread because of the flexibility it provides for the development of the product. It requires effective communication and collaboration with the stakeholders.
You may find it hard to shift from the Waterfall process to Agile. If you want to fully adopt the Agile process, outlining the requirements and feasibility of the project in the initial planning stage is can make it easier for you. Most importantly, the Agile process explained above is not the only process, it can be varied according to your requirement.
Author Bio: James Jackson has always been passionate about knowing everything about what is going around the world. This passion has been the driving force that has led him to be one of the most creative authors for Smart Business Daily.
