The Importance of Agile Development in Indian App Companies

In the present-day app development scenario, both agility and quick adaptability to evolving requirements have become key. Indian app development companies with a large share of the global outsourcing market find Agile methodologies the most important growth proponent. Agile development through constant iterations and collaboration with multiple stakeholders ensures delivering results that align to end user and business expectations perfectly. At the same time, agile development ensures quicker time to market and competitive cost advantages.

In this blog, we will explore agile methodologies, compare them with other development approaches, identify key business advantages, share best practices, and discuss the latest agile development trends.

Understanding Agile Development

Agile development is a methodology that unlike other development methodologies gives more priority to iteration, collaboration, and fine-tuning applications constantly.  While the traditional Waterfall approach relies on a linear process, giving no room for iterations and value additions once the developers start working on a preconceived plan, Agile through iterative sprints creates a continuous feedback loop for real-time fixing of issues, adjustments and value additions. For competitive excellence in your software app project, if you are looking for a team with proven expertise in Agile software development, then IndianAppDevelopers is your trusted partner. Having a consistent focus on continuous collaboration and iterations, they help your application to evolve and flourish with new value additions as per user expectations and emerging market demands.

Most statistics from leading market watchers showcase the popularity and effectiveness of Agile. According to a recent report from Hygger, app development projects embracing agile methodology are 28.0% more successful than projects adhering to traditional methods. The same report also reveals that a whopping 86.0% of international software developers prefer Agile methodology for their projects.

The cornerstones of Agile development methodology are as follows:

• Agile prioritizes collaboration with clients constantly throughout the development lifecycle instead of negotiating over the contract.
• Another principle of agile development is a quick response to required changes. As new requirements emerge and new features are requested, Agile teams quickly address them instead of sticking to their preconceived plan.
• Agile teams concentrate on delivering a more efficient solution instead of adhering to prior documentation, and to achieve this, they often outgrow the original plan.

A Brief Comparison Between Agile and Other Methodologies

The app development world leaned completely towards the agile approach as developers and stakeholders found it to be more result-driven, flexible, and competitive. Let’s see how agile development excels over other methodologies.

Agile vs Lean Approach

Lean development refers to a more practical approach that focuses on building and releasing the core product quickly by getting rid of unnecessary elements. Both approaches prioritize client satisfaction and faster delivery but the Lean approach at times is too constrained in terms of accommodating suggestive changes from stakeholders.
Agile methodology ensures optimum flexibility when accommodating iterations from stakeholders. While it also prioritizes efficiency and quick time to market, it doesn’t do away with emerging requirements and changes.

Agile vs PRINCE2

PRINCE2 approach refers to Projects In Controlled Environments. This development approach is popularized by product-based companies that plan their projects meticulously through a structured project board. Different high-level tasks are prioritized through this board and taken care of by the project manager. Despite involving higher management and stakeholders in the process, this approach doesn’t guarantee faster delivery time.

Agile, on the other hand, does not stick to a fixed plan for the entire development lifecycle. Instead of creating a structured project board for tracking tasks, it ensures developing small blocks of the product and delivering the same to the client asking for feedback that can further result in iterative changes.

Agile vs Waterfall

Waterfall represents a very linear development approach that doesn’t allow for completing multiple tasks of the project simultaneously. You need to complete a task comprehensively and mark it ‘done’ before moving to the next step in the queue. This is now considered to be the most siloed development methodology.

Businesses switched from Waterfall to Agile primarily to ensure that the end product fully aligns with their expectations. On the other hand, because of building multiple components of the product simultaneously, the agile approach ensures faster delivery time.

Why Agile Development Matters for Indian App Companies?

Indian app developers constitute the vast majority of the global outsourcing talent pool in the IT services industry. Thanks to agile they can deliver more projects in less time involving fewer resources. Agile methodology allows Indian IT companies to flex their muscles in the extremely competitive global outsourcing market. Here are the key reasons why most app development companies in India adopt the agile approach.

Rapid Adaptation

Indian app developers are sought after for their ability to address diverse clients’ needs across domain niches. The agile approach further adds fuel to their capabilities. The agile development approach enables IT services companies to respond to fast-evolving client requirements.

This also helps companies to stay ahead of the competition by releasing quick updates and rapidly rolling out new features. Thanks to Agile, they can also stay tuned to the latest technologies and trends without any delay in the product release.

Optimum Collaboration

Indian app development companies functioning mainly through a distributed workforce find the agile approach a perfect fit to ensure close collaboration. The agile method ensures regular communication facilitated by daily stand-ups, quick sprint reviews, and retrospective feedback gathering.

This approach becomes even more effective when dealing with cross-functional teams. Multiple distributed teams involving developers, designers, analysts, and QA experts can stay tuned to the process constantly.

Iteration & Testing Leading to Highest Quality

As we all know, two cornerstones of the agile approach are continuous iteration and frequent product testing followed by each iteration. This iterative development and continuous testing ultimately results in high quality output.

Thanks to repeated testing and iteration bugs and faultlines can be detected early and often and can be addressed simultaneously following review. The scope of integration is also reviewed frequently leaving no chance for shortcomings in the final product.

Competitive Cost Advantage

The agile approach also allows companies to give a boon to their bottom line by doing more with limited resources. Since competitive business ticket size is a key reason for global companies to look toward Indian development companies, agile becomes a practical approach. For a deeper understanding of how Indian app companies optimize costs, explore our insights on app development cost in India.

The agile method focuses on prioritizing features for quick release while keeping options open for frequent updates and value additions based on feedback and iterations. This ensures the least wastage of developer and infrastructure resources leading to assured cost advantage. On the other hand, the chances of releasing a product hitting below the level of user expectations get lower.

Faster Time-to-Market

The agile approach of creating iterative cycles helps companies to build and release apps incrementally. They can release the product early and release further updates often thanks to the iterative cycles.
An app development company in India can release an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with key features and core UI/UX elements and through subsequent updates can add more features, bring more integrations, and fix issues of the earlier releases. This ultimately helps in faster product launch and meeting quality expectations.

Involving Domain Expertise with Ease

App development companies in India catering to a variety of industry domains like manufacturing, automobile, e-commerce, fintech, healthcare, utility, and more need to involve clients in incorporating mission-critical domain knowledge in the development process.

Since the Agile approach prioritizes client involvement in all phases of an app project, incorporating domain knowledge becomes easier. The frequent client involvement and client feedback also allow them to align the product better with specific client needs and expectations.

Scalability and Change Management

There are app projects where project scopes get bigger over time. This is where the incremental approach of the Agile method helps. Indian app developers catering to diverse industry domains and businesses of all sizes and strengths often come across new requirements.

Whether to scale up a project scope based on the market traction or to manage frequent changes in a development project, agile is the most suitable development methodology. Agile allows scaling resources and involving new tools and technologies dynamically.

Latest Trends Shaping the Future of Agile Development

Though the future of the Agile approach in the context of Indian app development is already overwhelmingly promising, many disruptive technologies, tools, and requirements can determine the winners among agile adopters. Here are some of the key trends.

Scaling Agile with SAF

SAFs or Scaled Agile Frameworks have become popular for implementing best agile practices in development environments. These frameworks offering a set of principles and workflow patterns can make it easier for companies to adopt Agile methodology at an enterprise scale.

SAFs are more important for large enterprises where coordinating among multiple Agile teams can lead to unparalleled complexity, especially when different teams are working on several interconnected projects. SAF comes with a structured approach to put the efforts of every team in the larger context of the business goal.

Focus on DevOps

DevOps and DevSecOps approaches referring to the close integration of multiple organizational processes for achieving common business goals share many crucial value propositions with the Agile method.

Naturally, in many enterprise app projects Agile and DevOps are overlapping with each other to facilitate continuous delivery and integration for top-notch quality output. In the coming years, we can expect agile and DevOps to play a more mutually inclusive role in projects.

Integration of AI and Machine Learning

Both AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are allowing developers to automate many routine tasks thus freeing up resources. AI and machine learning are also helping development teams get hold of valuable predictive insights triggering course corrections and iterations.

The AI/ML integration is also helping development teams to make data-driven decisions within the project resulting in fewer errors and performance issues. The AI/ML integration is helping to reduce project risks to a minimum level.

Agile Training and Certification

With the widespread adoption of Agile by Indian app development companies, professional certification, and training in Agile have become more popular and respected than ever before. No wonder agile certification is often considered to be a good-to-have qualification for today’s developers.

To advance their careers in the rapidly proliferating app development market developers now can opt for certifications such as CSM (Certified Scrum Master) and PMI-ACP (PMI Agile Certified Practitioner). These certifications are often regarded as valuable skill-based assets for developers and project managers.

Conclusion
Like in many parts of the world, Agile methodology has brought a great boon for IT services and development companies in India. Now powered by AI/ML and a host of disruptive technologies, agile can push for the automation of development tasks, reviews, and iterations based on feedback. Agile has become the very level-playing field for future innovations to take place.