How Agile Can Connect Your Business Strategy With Your Software Development Realities

There is often a divide between the realities of software development and how businesses treat the products produced. Many non-developers often view the investment as a concrete product — like a building that doesn’t need maintenance or monitoring.

But unlike physical real estate, the permanence or longevity of digital real estate depends on a myriad of internal decisions and external factors. These factors also determine the speed of decay. While this decay happens at a much slower rate for physical structures, digital decay can occur anywhere between 6 to 12 months. 

Most of the time, when you build a digital product or service, it will need to be updated for security and systems stability. Things can get complicated when you have a monolithic piece of software that is hard to update, upgrade or grow. 

So how do you deal with such an issue? 

The Power of an Agile Approach

The concept of an agile approach is something that gets thrown around a lot. However, an agile business is more than just the ability to move quickly against market demands. If your business has a digital platform, agility is also determined by your ability to deliver new features against existing products and services. 

The idea of agile has its roots in software development. Under traditional models, software is often created in large cycles. Agile reduces the size of this cycle and focuses on a particular feature or problem at a time. This shortens the feedback loop and increases the velocity of your ability to deliver products to the market. 

You can have multiple agile cycles occurring in a concurrent manner — but it will require a high level of coordination and understanding of what your business vision and strategies are. 

What your Developers Actually Do

Software is a digital interface between you and your customer. It is akin to your brick and mortar shop or your physical retailed product — except it is intangible and with the potential for automation and usage of AI. The experience of your software is materialized through your customer’s devices.

A developer’s role is more than just being the builder of software. They are also engineers that survey the stability of an application, creating structural changes as necessary to fulfill the requirements. 

When requirements are wide and large, it is expected that an equally sizable change will occur. If the requirements are impactful on the overall architecture, major renovations may be required to prevent the code from collapsing into itself. 

An agile approach often reduces requirement size significantly, thus reducing the risk of change being exposed with delivery of a new feature to your application. Dealing with problems and potentially hazardous areas therefore become more manageable. 

Why not Add More Developers?

Software development is a complex task with multiple moving parts. There is an equilibrium for project size and adding more developers will not necessarily guarantee that issues will be resolved faster or easier. 

This is because having more brains on the matter will not reduce the problem in a productively significant manner. Rather, it only serves to further delay and increase the complexity of trying to work out an agreeable solution among different parties. Any change will also be required to be communicated, and this in itself is something that can take a good portion of time. 

It is the reality and nuance of software development, thus agile teams are kept small for efficiency and effective communication between everyone involved. Tasks are often not siloed but are cross functional across each team member to ensure that the structural technicalities are traveling down the most robust path. 

So how does Agile Help Implement your Strategy?

The purpose of your strategy is to move your business towards fulfilling the vision. Agile breaks up the strategy into bite-sized goals, where value is incremented with each feature upgrade or delivery. 

While you could argue that delivery in small chunks is essentially the same as delivering a large application, the latter doesn’t get the benefit of issue discovery. 

Software is never one hundred percent perfect due to the variety of devices, screen sizes, and different hardware available for potential customers to experience your digital platform for service or product delivery. Some issues can pass through and only the end-user is able to experience and report it. 

Agile also helps align your business with your software development needs. It takes time to build a feature or release an upgrade. The bigger the feature or expected set of things to be delivered, the more complex the entire exercise becomes.

This is the reality of software development and an agile approach is much more constructive towards providing you with data that can be assessed against your strategy. With the feedback loop reduced in length, judgment on future trajectories are much more accurate than using other methods for software project delivery.

Co-authored by:

Dave Wesley ~ President, SRG
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Aphinya Dechalert ~ Marketing Communications, SRG
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