Agile Development

Agile design for agile systems.

We will help define your business logic and create features using well designed components using established frameworks. We use separation of concerns, abstractions and patterns to make future code changes easier and less prone to introducing bugs. We rely heavily on RAD tools and agile techniques to prototype and refine working designs early in the software life-cycle, and we aim to produce 80% of features using existing tested libraries and components. Not reinventing the wheel a key element of our business.

keyboard typingWhat is agile development?

Agile design encompasses the entire software life-cycle to model the data and processes that comprise your business systems. The whole process becomes an iteratiive design with code providing the documentation enabling automated build and delivery to provide greater efficiencies. Key elements of agile modelling and design include:

 

The agile manifesto

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is based on twelve principles:

  1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.
  3. Deliver working software 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
  6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
  7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
  8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
  10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
  11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
  12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly
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Why agile design is important.

The Agile Manifesto emphasizes people and interactions over processes and tools. In practice, this means communicating frequently both within teams and with the customer, as well as doing things like daily scrum meetings so that the whole team can stay looped in on the activities of its members.

This creates the consistent feedback loop that enables teams to adjust based on what customers, beta testers and the market is telling them, while also checking frequently to ensure their work is functional in the environment in which it will ultimately live.

More than anything, the agile process emphasizes the production of on-time and on-budget deliverables, not perfection, as products can always be tweaked down the road. This mostly takes the form of iterations, short, intense periods of production with smaller, more achievable goals that build in further iterations down the road.

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Agile improves client relationships

More traditional design processes play to a common desire among designers to present only the most perfect products to clients. This begins in the proposal and research phase with overly elaborate PSD mockups and continues to the final approval phase.

But for the most complex projects, it really doesn’t make sense to design for weeks if not months in the abstract, completely devoid of client input. Clients often gain a much clearer understanding of what they’re looking for as a site comes together. What’s more, market demand has a habit of changing quicker than designers can produce. This can be frustrating when working within a paradigm in which rerouting is both labor and time intensive.

Adopting an agile approach of looping clients into every phase of the process and producing a constant stream of deliverables can help fix this, as it allows clients to play around with designs as they go. 

Explore how Syntapse can assist your business and software development. Contact us for further assistance or general enquiries.

We can offer a range of services from half day consultancy, assessment reports, and troubleshooting to long term greenfield project involvement

As your technology partners we are happy to hear from schools and local authorities, communities and charities, engineers and scientists, startups and institutions