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Agile Methodology

Mascottech uses Agile methodology as an alternative to traditional project management. It helps us respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. Agile methodology is prefered at Mascottech, however, there certain prjoect that performed under waterfall, or traditional sequential development if required.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is the most popular way of introducing Agility due to its simplicity and flexibility. At Mascottech, we perform Scrum’s to it's actual definition. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self management, and striving to build properly tested product increments within short iterations. Scrum has three roles: Product Owner, Team, and Scrum Master. The responsibilities of the traditional project manager role are split up among these three Scrum roles. Scrum has five meetings: Backlog Grooming (aka Backlog Refinement), Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum (aka 15-minute standup), the Sprint Review Meeting, and the Sprint Retrospective Meeting.

Why Agile?

Agile development methodology provides opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. This is achieved through regular cadences of work, known as sprints or iterations, at the end of which teams must present a potentially shippable product increment. By focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product they yield, agile methodology is described as “iterative” and “incremental.” In waterfall, development teams only have one chance to get each aspect of a project right. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. — is continually revisited throughout the lifecycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project every two weeks, there’s always time to steer it in another direction.

The results of this “inspect-and-adapt” approach to development greatly reduce both development costs and time to market. Because teams can develop software at the same time they’re gathering requirements, the phenomenon known as “analysis paralysis” is less likely to impede a team from making progress. And because a team’s work cycle is limited to two weeks, it gives stakeholders recurring opportunities to calibrate releases for success in the real world. Agile development methodology helps companies build the right product. Instead of committing to market a piece of software that hasn’t even been written yet, agile empowers teams to continuously replan their release to optimize its value throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace. Development using an agile methodology preserves a product’s critical market relevance and ensures a team’s work doesn’t wind up on a shelf, never released.

Agile vs Traditional Approach?

Software should not be developed like an automobile on an assembly line, in which each piece is added in sequential phases. In such sequential phases, every phase of the project must be completed before the next phase can begin. In traditional phase based approach, developers first gather all of a project’s requirements, then complete all of its architecture and design, then write all of the code, and so on. Traditional approach lacks communication between the specialized groups that complete each phase of work

It’s easy to see how the “waterfall” methodology is far from optimized compared to agile methodology. First of all, it assumes that every requirement of the project can be identified before any design or coding occurs. Put another way, your are counting on tell a team of developers everything that needed to be in a piece of software before it was up and running. Wouldn't it be easier to describe your vision to the team if you could react to functional software? In traditional software development your scope is locked, but business realities change dramatically during the development process then the product will irrelevant. In that scenario, a company may end up spending time and money to create software that no one wants. Agile development ensures product remains relevant to the business realities and pivots accordingly.