Back

Agile development model for the #WFH age

The present situation where everyone is trying to stay afloat amid the coronavirus crisis is unprecedented, as we have never witnessed this kind of disruption in our lives or in business. The current scenario of working from home will continue to be the new normal. To prevent further disruptions and ensure clients continue to benefit from improved software quality, better productivity and reduced costs, we have scaled our agile methodology to ensure work continues unhindered even from home.

How Nuage team adapted well using Agile methodology in #WFH age

In the current digital technology landscape, our development teams with expertise in front-end development, back-end development, UI/UX, cloud specialists, security experts and QA work together in an agile environment by adhering to the following principles:

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, we have moved from 4 week sprints to 1-2 week sprints to ensure features or updates are released on a continual basis.
Transitioned to Infrastructure as code enabling the team to deploy the application securely and without errors. Removing the manual steps and embedding those steps in a script that can be automated and executed repeatedly has allowed our teams to be more productive
Security through DevSecsOps, combines application, infrastructure, and data security in a continuous model. Incorporating security at the code level allows the team members to identify and fix potential vulnerabilities before the code is passed on to the next stage

These are in addition to the principles that we had been following even before the current situation:

Preparing design flows and wireframes to create iterative designs outlining the requirements and get approval from the client before developing the designs
Understanding the detailed requirements to offer complete transparency in cost through a fixed cost pricing model
Ownership of cloud/mobile developer accounts are handed over to the client and Nuage only keeps the delegated rights

Visible Benefits of the Nuage agile methodology while #WFH:

According to the internal benchmarks of PWC, agile development offers immense benefits. It improves productivity between 14% to 95% depending on the industry, enhances employee satisfaction by 20% to 40%, reduces cost by 7% to 29% and time to market also gets better by 18% to 20%. In terms of quality the defect escape rate also reduces.

By efficiently responding to changing business requirements, we have seen a vast improvement from implementing agile in a remote or #WFH environment:

By dividing complex projects into smaller simpler components and assigning these to sprints, the team is able to ensure continuous iterative code delivery. We are also able to check the progress of individual components on a near continuous basis to get a real time view of the progress.
Using Microsoft Teams to discuss the daily scrum before work starts allows for better communication, constant collaboration and helps track progress on a continuous basis. This results in successfully completing sprints.
Instant communication through Zoom and Microsoft Teams enables instantaneous communication between the individual team members to solve issues quickly.
Our strategy of involving QA right from Day 1 enables us to provide appropriate focus on quality.
To enhance client involvement and satisfaction, we do daily scrum, weekly showcase and 2-4 week release into client QA process. This allows the clients to do a hands-on validation of the functionality and provide feedback that can be incorporated into the subsequent iterations.

Conclusion

With remote working and #WFH becoming the new normal, it becomes imperative to follow an agile approach and at Nuage we have seen the productivity level increase and clients acknowledge the value of our deliverables and the pace at which they are being delivered. The “Nice to have” features have now become an essential component for improving productivity. Having successfully transitioned to a #WFH environment, Nuage has the expertise to navigate the agile development lifecycle and offer a competitive advantage to its clients resulting from higher software quality, lower costs and improved team productivity.

Need Remote Agile team to support your development projects? Reach us now