Agile methodologies are becoming more and more popular today, especially for small startup groups. Though I'm sure there are much larger organizations that have achieved success with its strategy I can see smaller projects jumping on it much quicker.
To the project team itself agile methods might look great, but convincing management and people that talk business sense it is a good thing is often a much harder process. I find this interesting because one of the main focuses of agile is to place the quality of software over everything else. As a primary metric, agile and agile meta models (SCRUM for example), focus on making maximum business sense or providing maximum business value at the end of every iteration.
Ok, so agile makes it a standing point to deliver on what the customer wants at the end of each iteration, but what are the other motivating factors behind pushing agile as a model for delivering real business value.
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An improved feedback and control loop
Agile provides its clients with frequent opportunities to provide feedback at the end of an iteration. With this, they can further direct the project in an incremental fashion, driving the next iteration with their business sense, asking questions like "What is of most business value to me right now$%:" This iterative feedback from both the client and project team lead to advantages that would otherwise not be available, jumping on new and upcoming technologies and developments to spearhead the next iteration.
These changes and developments have the effect of spearheading the project towards success and an overall better product. In some cases, it can provide improved return on investment by allowing the product to be deployed much earlier. Remember, an iteration focuses on delivering the most business value it can. If there is enough of that value there, enough to make this business sense just that, it is worth deploying early to start recouping on costs before the product has even reached the end of its development life cycle. By the time the project has come to completion, you may well have recouped half of your initial investment.
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Avoid catastrophes
It's common for a project to be tracking well and suddenly fall behind at a late stage in development. Why$%: Traditional software development life cycle models find it much harder to judge the correctness and completeness of up front analysis and design. This lack of information sometimes leads to overly optimistic views which don't manifest until much later in the project when it is too late to do anything about it. Do you cut your losses and get out$%: Or take the risk$%: Well, another way to look at it would be to avoid this risk altogether. And by avoid, we really mean circumvent. As an iterative model, agile performs short bursts of analysis, design and implementation often. This gives rise to much more tracking data before entering the next iteration to re-evaluate where the project is at and if it is still on track.
The only four variables we really have control over in software development are: time, scope, cost and quality. Having the advantage of a model closely tied to these variables often and right throughout the projects life cycle is a big risk mitigator.
A focus on quality
This is a major area of agile models and comes back to core concepts known as the agile manifesto. It is basically saying; focus on quality software that translates into real business value for the customer each step of the way. Deliver this value at the end of each iteration, even if it means less formal practices and documentation is kept. Use customer collaboration as an improvement mechanism and embrace any change that might be coming.
Like extreme programming agile also adopts the practice of pair programming. No discussion on "What makes good business value$%:" or "What brings good return on investment$%:" would be complete without talking about it. It's often hard convincing management that using two people on one task is beneficial. The productivity of having two people on one task is slightly lower than each working individually (I'm not going to make up any fancy statistics here:)). So this would raise the argument that pair programming actually costs more! What you cannot as easily measure however is the increase in quality pair programming brings.
Agile promotes information sharing
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All information is shared amongst team members, often with the activities being shared to: analysis, design and implementation (pair programming during development for example). This information loop routinely filters through to the customer too. After all, that's why they are there, to provide input going into the next iteration.
Agile development however is not necessarily well suited to all types of projects. Sometimes no matter how hard you try you just cannot come up with a good enough business reason to justify the model. That's fine, agile does not suit every type of project small and large. Just recognize when you might be able to gain the flexibility and momentum it offers.
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