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The Most Common Misunderstanding of Agile Software Development

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Many organizations believe Agile is just about development and focus solely on an iterative or incremental approach to development, ignoring other aspects like requirements, designs, tests, and deployments. Agile is not just about development. It is not about maintaining your SDLC phased approach and iterating just over the development phase and keeping a long big upfront requirements phase or design phase at the start, and a long and painful testing and deployment phase at the end.

This approach is way too common in organizations that believe they are Agile. This approach still results with a risky big bang release. It does not increase feedback loops to validate the requirements and ensure customer satisfaction. It does not improve ROI, as there is no return until the very very end.

Agile approaches are about iterative and incremental delivery and not just development. Agile is a mindset that embraces the Agile values and principles. Two principles from the manifesto state:

Principle 1: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

Principle 3: “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

In order to continuously delivery high quality working software, we need to figure out how to work with emerging requirements and progressively elaborate on them on an ongoing basis throughout the sprint. At the same time, we need to be able to code, test, and deploy in a matter of days not months or years.

Deliver in Days

Let’s explore how Agile testing can help make that happen.

Check out the complete Agile Testing series: