Agile has been a ‘buzzword’  for the last decade especially within the software and development industry, however the concept of ‘agile’ and it’s significance to your business is still somewhat of a mystery for many.

Here at aXcelerate, our development team strive to maintain an agile approach when developing and creating new features and products within our student management system. This is because ‘becoming agile’ allows for greater flexibility and ensures the team can react effectively to changing requirements, whether that be changing customer requests, changes to compliance regulations within the VET sector or other external factors.

In order to provide this flexibility however, the key concept within the agile framework is the need to focus less on fixed and rigid timelines and specifications. Instead, being agile emphasises the need to accept change within your organisation and to accommodate the likelihood of changing requirements when originally scoping a project. This can be a difficult concept to grasp initially, especially for project managers who are used to working around deadlines or a specific scope.

At the global newspaper corporation The Guardian, the development team also rely heavily on agile processes, so that they can effectively handle 997 million page impressions per month.

They provided the following tips to companies looking to adopt an agile framework which hopefully provides insight for those interested in the concept but still unsure as to how you would implement an agile process. It also provides a glimpse into how our very own development team work in order to create new features and run the aXcelerate system.

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No estimations – no deadlines

Although sometimes sticking to certain time windows is essential (especially when there is third party involvement), deadlines are not a usual phenomenon at the Guardian’s Platforms team. Additionally, estimations can be a quite painful concept for any developer, especially when they are sometimes (mis)treated as deadlines by product managers. Developing big software systems is in its essence a very complex problem. For each task you have to consider creating a system that can scale to large amounts of traffic and is able to handle large traffic spikes, whilst still providing a quality service. Investigations and exploratory tasks are also very common, whilst the work schedule itself is very dynamic, with support requests and urgent feature requests occurring quite often. All these points underline why estimations can be very difficult. Initially they were used, but were abandoned in the process as they weren’t very accurate and it was commonly believed that they didn’t bring much value to the process. It is worth mentioning the psychological factor too; it is much less stressful not to have to estimate the time for a task if you spend more time on it than your original estimate. Finally it’s worth noting the fact that the Guardian, through its online version, offers a service instead of a product which makes this feasible (as there is no date for the next version of the product to be shipped to its clients) and this could be considered one of the advantages of software as a service in general.

Planning & Reviewing

The Guardian team aim to regularly set milestones based on what their desirable outcomes are. These milestones can, of course, change and adapt if in the process the goal posts have moved. Setting an ultimate target and always seeing the bigger picture is what helps the team understand if they are moving towards the right direction. For that purpose there are quarterly and mid-quarterly review meetings where they try to do just that. In the quarterly sessions the team’s objectives are defined and clear targets are set. The focus of the mid-quarter sessions is to review the status and the progress against those objectives, as well as raise any issues or blockers that need attention. Metrics and KPIs are also valuable tools in their arsenal to determine if they are meeting these milestones and moving in the right direction.

Agile in its essence

It is a very common pitfall for Scrum (a popular agile method) to be applied in a ritualistic form. Whenever this happens the true meaning of being agile is lost. The Guardian team try to use all the considered agile best practices, but only in a way that makes sense in each specific case. No method is fixed; it may change to one week for example, if it fits the circumstances better. Ultimately the team apply all the well known agile methodologies and practices but every time through a critical perspective, adapting and adjusting them. This is a great mentality to have not only in a software development process, but in all contexts within a business.

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Indeed, while the agile process was originally developed for the IT and software industry, due to the ever-increasing volume of success stories the concept has been widely adopted across a variety of industries, including media and technology, large corporations and the government.

Because we now work in such a fast paced working environment where regular advancements in technology and communication force us to constantly change and update our processes, the agile framework becomes a highly beneficial tool. Being agile requires us to focus on clear communication and effectively facilitate and co-ordinate projects in order to be better equipped for changing requirements when they ultimately arise. Considering the VET sector is often changing and updating compliance requirements, adopting a more flexible approach to project and development management can be worthwhile for many training organisations. It has certainly been highly worthwhile for aXcelerate and is something we wish to improve on further in the coming years.

To find out more about specific agile frameworks, click here