One of the inquiries I receive frequently as an IT consultant is, “We implemented Agile. Why do we not experience the benefits we anticipated? Adopting Agile involves more than just producing software in brief iterations and setting up lots of meetings and debates. I’d like to describe our recent experience working with a transport company situated in the EU, and how two changes to their Agile processes enabled us to create high-quality software six times more quickly!

How It All Started

A website for selling tickets, a mobile application for purchasing tickets, a mobile application for drivers, and an application for managing back-office operations were just a few of the software solutions that our team of 15 IT experts helped the Customer create from the ground up and thoroughly modernise. There were 40 people on the team working for the customer. After working together for around 4-6 weeks, we saw that the development tempo was significantly slower than it should have been with Agile and that communication between the business and development teams wasn’t always easy. We shared our worries with the client and made the following two suggestions, which proved to be game-changers.

Reorganising the Team Structure

Rearranging the development teams was where we started. We introduced feature teams that are better suited for large Agile projects in place of conventional teams structured around tasks like business analysis, development, QA, etc. Cross-functional, long-lived teams known as feature teams select features from the product backlog one at a time and complete them. They consist of back office employees, marketing managers, business analysts, QA engineers, and developers. We supported in developing communication between people with varied backgrounds in order to enable people to understand the changes and collaborate effectively. We also established the appropriate policies.

Feature teams have shown to be a potent tool for reducing time to market. The wastes associated with handoffs, waiting, dispersed information, and underutilised personnel were immediately minimised. They considerably increased productivity as well since taking ownership of a task from beginning to end encouraged motivation and job satisfaction. The Client also mentioned enhanced openness as an advantage. For all the departments, the developers’ work became apparent. Everyone was aware of the functionality that was being developed and what was upcoming.

Introducing CI/CD and Automated Testing

Agility and speed should be present at all SDLC stages, not just during planning and development, in order to achieve a quick time to market. So:

• To hasten the delivery of dependable updates and modifications, we created effective CI/CD pipelines.
• To cut down on testing time and volume, 70% of tests were automated. Most of the functional regression, integration, and cross-browser testing was automated by the team. For quick first inspections of recently deployed features and one-time runs, we preserved the manual tests. These tests assisted in giving the developers quick feedback following hotfixes. In order to run tests automatically each time a new change was introduced and to ensure secure nightly builds, test automation engineers additionally implemented continuous testing into the continuous integration (CI) pipeline.

Real Benefits of Agile Can Be Amazing

The first release cycle lasted two to three months. All of the customer’s teams supplied new features and significant improvements every two weeks after the adjustments were made. And none of this included sacrificing the quality of the software.

Embrace Agile with True Experts!

Agile consultants from Livyoung Realtech’s help companies implement the best Agile techniques and make sure the process takes into account their business imperatives.