Agile Software Development Solutions

Successful IT consulting and development means to us facing strategic, methodical and technological issues in a goal-oriented way and implement suitable solutions. In doing so flexibility becomes more and more important, especially against the background of fast changing technologies and market conditions. This makes an agile software development necessary which enabels you to react to changes quickly and flexibly as well as to hold high-quality software for your company at any time.

There are always the stories about software development projects that do not work out according to plan and do not or only insufficiently reach their goals. This is mostly due to the fact that many software projects are too complex to be planned in detail beforehand. Agile software development begins just at this point by permitting a flexible and transparent project planning.

Within the frame of agile software development there are different methods, like e.g. Scrum, which base upon an incremental plan refinement within a project. The foundation for these agile models is the agile manifesto that consists of four values and twelve principles.

The four values of agile working are:

• People and collaboration before processes and tools
• Operable software before extensive documentation
• Collaboration with principals before contractual negotiations
• Reacting to changes before stubbornly following the plan

Classical software development methods like the waterfall model quite often lead to an unsatisfying project result due to static/rigid requirements. Since the turn of the millennium more and more companies count on agility. Instead of accepting the development’s functional scope as a given and fixed parameter, agile software development puts the functional scope in the last place in line. Instead quality, timeliness and profit are the most important factors for the agile software development. Requirement changes are expected. A consequent change management, feedback accumulation and process improvements are fixed work elements for any agile team.

From our long-standing experience in the field of software development, we at CONET know about the success factors and the risks of both the classic as well as the agile working methods from numerous projects. Thus, you can trust us to choose the best promising method and tool mix for your requirements.

Frequently used is the agile scrum method. With scrum you distinguish your project parties between product owner, team and scrum master. Whereas the product owner is the customer or the principal, respectively, who defines the requirements, the scrum team is a team of developers who work on the project’s success in an independent and self-organized way. The scrum master is a kind of moderator between the team and the product owner holding the whole project together. Standing rules help to ensure that the developers can work in an undisturbed way and that change requests are channeled. The team works based upon the product backlog provided by the product owner that contains all requirements including their priorities. This requirement catalogue can be amended or altered at any time during the project’s duration. The project management is being divided in scrum time units called „sprints“ with a determined duration of either 10, 15 or 30 days.

A first and main argument for the usage of agile software development is the acceleration of the development procedure due to less or more efficient coordination processes and the overcoming of technical and organizational obstacles.

But agile software development offers much more than time efficiency. Agile values, principles, methods and finally processes can, if correctly understood and implemented, ensure a project’s success and increase the advantages of new applications significantly.

According to the principles of agility, the immediate cooperation between all project participants attaches higher priority than within standard procedures. Agile software development shows its advantages especially when the solutions to be developed are highly individualistic and merely few fixed framework conditions exist:

• Close feedback with the principal and future users
• Permanent reconciliation of expectations, goals and specifications
• Flexible possibilities to react to new framework conditions
• Early recognition and correction of aberrations
• Higher user acceptance
• Higher quality for the evolving solution

Therefore, CONET’s agile software development covers it all:

• Holistic approach
• Fundamental requirement analysis
• Use of established standards for project and risk management
• Testing tools and evaluation methods
• Practice-oriented conception in close cooperation with the principal
• Targeted development of necessary solution components
• Implementation and integration into the existing infrastructures
• Implementation of demanding/challenging solutions from one hand

With their broad know-how our software developer teams implement individual solutions from professional applications towards complex software architectures with Microsoft .NET & SharePoint, Java, IBM Notes, IBM WebSphere, C#, ASP.NET, Open Source Software and numerous other programming tools, leaving nothing more to be desired. Standards are our daily business - individual solutions our speciality. With CONET, you rely on highly qualified software developers with many years of project experience who put the quality of your software first.

"Our expectations regarding the system have been significantly surpassed from the technical point of view. The system operates flawless and to our complete satisfaction. All our requirements have been integrated by CONET reliably in a creative and constructive way. Moreover, the system has shown several useful features which I have never seen before in my long-standing practical experience with Notes and Domino applications."

Frank Wahl, Technical Project Manager Bayer MaterialScience