There are officially 5 billion mobile users worldwide. 

Now more than ever, innovation, agility, user experience, and predictable software delivery are all requisites for any business to survive in today’s economy. Digital experiences, and particularly mobile experiences, are entirely ingrained in our day-to-day activities, so much so that people are often unaware of how small the gap is between their digital and real-world actions. Mobile services are officially an extension of subconscious human behavior. As a result, companies need to modernize existing approaches to customer experience and learn how to use technology as a means to facilitate and nurture what has now become mobile-driven customer relationships. 

While many companies have already entered the mobile app market to accommodate changing consumer expectations, these same companies seem to release mobile products that are not designed to scale and evolve, or worse, release products with a “set it and forget it” mentality. These static and ill-equipped mobile solutions elicit market failure from poor user experience and miss opportunities for product growth. Without recurring maintenance, rework, updates, and additions, the gap between customer needs and product value grows too wide to achieve business objectives. With a market that’s so densely saturated, it’s easy for customers to switch to higher-quality alternatives. 

Today, companies need to follow an agile software development model that will allow them to respond to fluctuating market and business climates, customer demands, competitive strains, and regulatory conditions with useful and error-free mobile app products, continuously and efficiently.

The amount of content that exists regarding agile is staggering. The content is either overwhelmingly technical or barely scratches the surface. Often the content doesn’t take into account what businesses are looking to achieve by adopting the principles of agile software development. For this reason, Clearbridge Mobile has assembled The Complete Guide to Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices—to help you understand agile methodologies in the context of mobile and how to use the agile framework to accomplish what matters most to you and your company: 

• Opening or modernizing mobile lines of business
• Maximizing business impact in the shortest amount of time
• Reducing the risks of an initial product launch
• Adapting to changing business requirements to maintain a competitive edge 
• Identifying and capitalizing on new market opportunities

This eBook is a collection of content covering key topics that include: 

• Building an agile transformation strategy
• Agile transformation challenges
• Selecting and developing individuals for agile app development teams
• The benefits of squad-based development
• The characteristics of successful agile app development
• The importance of flexibility in agile app development
• How to determine a project’s timeframe and scope
• An overview of development timelines
• How to manage project risks 
• How to scale agile methodologies 

Keep Reading:

Building an Agile Transformation Strategy: Getting Started

Agile Transformation Challenges: 6 Missteps That Slow Down Change

How to Select and Develop Individuals For Successful Agile Teams

This post will take a further look into squad-based agile development, what it entails, and the benefits that squad-based agile development can bring to an organization looking to compete in today’s market. 

What is a Squad

Squads – a concept inspired by Spotify’s engineering culture – are small, flexible teams that are responsible for the end-to-end delivery of each product. Each squad has no more than 8 members, is cross-functional, plans together, and sits together. While “squad” is just a name for the way we organize our team, in practice it offers many advantages.

Each squad works in a collaborative, transparent environment and uses the strengths of each team member to get the highest quality product to market in the least amount of time. When combined, multiple squads make up a tribe. A tribe is considered a collection of squads within the same business area. For example, there can be a tribe focusing on mobile phones. As all While the size of a tribe varies based on the size and scale of an organization, there are usually less than 100 people per tribe. 

Benefits of Using a Squad-Based Agile Mobile App Development Process

Intrinsic Knowledge

One of the biggest advantages of squads is that every member has full knowledge of every aspect of the project. This makes knowledge transfer easy, eliminates silos, and allows the team to retain knowledge for product maintenance or future phases. Since the squad plans together, the developers, architects, designers, QA, and product owners are all aware of the roles and responsibilities of one another. This approach reduces both personnel risk and knowledge risk to help keep project velocity consistent and predictable. 

Predictable Velocity

One of the most common risks in product development is time. As product needs evolve and new challenges arise, teams that aren’t flexible and adaptable struggle to meet deadlines. Since our squads plan together in relation to their capacity, share knowledge, and communicate frequently, they can remain flexible and adaptable. As a result, they can minimize downtime, rapidly overcome challenges, and offer predictable project velocity.

Faster Development Speed

Squads allow us to reduce waste and minimize downtime. Each member of the squad is involved in sprint planning so that every person is allocated specific tasks that cumulatively match the capacity of the squad. Since we use rolling-wave planning, our squads can adapt and pivot quickly to meet evolving project demands. As a result, we can avoid common downtime issues like waiting, non-utilized talent, and excess processing. Squads allow us to reduce waste and minimize downtime. Each member of the squad is involved in sprint planning so that every person is allocated specific tasks that cumulatively match the capacity of the squad. Since we use rolling-wave planning

Co-location

Co-location offers several often undervalued benefits. It helps streamline development time because teams can discuss issues face-to-face and reach solutions more quickly; it reduces unnecessary motion and travel, and it eases the transfer of knowledge. If one member of the squad needs another, they can turn and talk to them rather than hopping on a conference call or sending an email.

Furthermore, squads that share the same workspace for every project get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and become familiar with each other, which helps them develop trust and become more efficient as a team. 

Alignment & Autonomy

The concept of squad autonomy is another idea we adopted from the Spotify model. Each of our squads is aligned to work towards common goals in the product development process – for example, implementing a particular feature by a certain date. 

 Squads are autonomous in that they decide how they are going to reach their goals within the boundaries of the overall product strategy. While the user stories are created by the product owner following product goals, squads determine the best way to complete them. We’ve found that this practice makes our squads more efficient and creative, which ultimately results in better products. 

Risk Reduction

Project teams typically face two significant challenges in product development: knowledge risk and personnel risk. The former is the result of poor communication and collaboration and results in knowledge silos where each person has the knowledge to do their part, but no knowledge of what other members are responsible for. The latter is the risk associated with the members of each project team; for example, if somebody resigns or has an emergency and needs time off. 

Takeaway

Squad-based agile development helps to reduce these risks by encouraging cross-functional teams that have a 360-degree view of the project. The easy transfer of knowledge within squads allows them to adapt quickly if there is a personnel issue, without having to start from the ground-up. We’ve chosen to organize our development teams into squads because of the clear benefits of this approach. Easy knowledge transfer, co-location, team alignment, and autonomy allow us to deliver better products more quickly with predictable velocity and lower risk.

Keep Reading:

10 Characteristics of Successful Agile Software Development

The Importance of Flexibility in Agile App Development

How to Determine Timeframe and Scope in Agile Development

In agile app development, the project management triangle is comprised of three project constraints time, scope, and cost. The best mobile app development companies understand that flexibility is often required in at least one of these boundaries. As needs and objectives evolve, knowing which is flexible lets product teams adapt seamlessly without affecting your ability to deliver a successful mobile product.

The core benefit of building flexibility into the agile app development process is that it mitigates risk. The key is understanding exactly where flexibility is a priority.

Where to Prioritize Flexibility in the Agile App Development Process

Knowing which boundary is flexible lets product teams adapt seamlessly without affecting your ability to deliver a successful product

Time

There are some projects where the delivery date is set in stone. The product may need to be released simultaneously with another launch; for example, a preloaded app that needs to be ready for the release of a new device or prior to a scheduled event. When this is the case, one of the other two boundaries will need to be flexible.

For other projects, time may not be the most important aspect. If your business goals dictate that the product needs a certain amount of features and functionalities or needs to be developed within a particular budget, time will be the flexible boundary.

Scope

When time or budget are rigid, the scope is the flexible constraint. There is nothing wrong with having to scale back features and functionalities; on the contrary, going to market with a minimum viable product (MVP) and following a rapid and frequent delivery model allows you to collect data and use insights to add value to users on an ongoing basis. There are significant benefits to choosing an iterative, agile development process over an all-or-nothing approach, like building a business case for additional budget or funding from stakeholders.

Budget

If there is scope creep or project scope increases but the timeline is rigid, the budget needs to become the flexible boundary. When more resources, more features, and more functionalities are required then the budget must be able to accommodate those changes.

Identifying Your Flexible Boundary

While there are variations in every agile development process, a foundational aspect of agile methodology is the ability to adapt and respond to changes without losing velocity. To achieve this, flexibility is a necessity.

In an ideal world, agile development projects wouldn’t need flexible time, scope, or budget constraints. However, failing to account for the fact that product teams might have to bend as products evolve or new needs arise is very risky; if something does change, there is no contingency plan that allows the team to deliver a market-ready product.

Enter flexibility. By identifying which project boundary is flexible, product teams can adapt without losing velocity. Consider the following scenario:

You have identified that scope is your flexible boundary. You know which features and functionalities are critical for your minimum viable product, and there are others on the product roadmap that are highly desired and nice to have. You prioritize tasks accordingly using the MoSCoW technique (must have, should have, could have, won’t Have), aiming for a particular number of features/functionalities. But, you have accounted for the fact that if there are issues, you can scale back and still have the capacity to deliver your MVP within the other two boundaries. As a result, if there is a snag, you are now able to focus resources on the critical aspects of the project and save lower priorities for future releases.

Failing to account for the fact that product teams might have to bend as products evolve or new needs arise is very risky.

In this scenario, if the scope wasn’t identified as a flexible boundary, the result would be a sub-par product with partially completed or improperly tested features, delivered in a rush and likely defective. Trying to deliver everything would essentially give the user nothing – except a poor user experience.

The same principle applies to time and budget. If you plan for the possibility that things may not go as planned, you are able to adapt.

Building Flexibility Into an Agile App Development Process

There are practices that allow you to bake flexibility into the agile app development process itself. These practices help with time, scope, and budget management, but also allow for rapid adaptability to changing needs.

• Squad-based agile development – Squads are small co-located teams that are responsible for the end-to-end delivery of a product. They plan together, share knowledge, and have a known capacity. This reduces risk and allows for predictable velocity.
• Rolling wave planning – Rolling wave planning involves delaying product decisions until you’re in the best position to make them. This technique lets product teams analyze and act upon the knowledge that wasn’t available at project kick-off. This lowers your risk, minimizes downtime, and allows you to adjust to changing product needs.
• Flexible capacity – Squads have a known maximum capacity, but the ability to scale up or down within that capacity. Since all members share knowledge of the project, when you need the squad at full capacity every team member can easily jump in; when the workload is lighter resources can be scaled down.

Ultimately, flexibility is at the basis of a truly agile development methodology. Identifying where your flexibility lies, accounting for it in your project plan, and building it into the agile development process will allow you to adapt to changes and still have the ability to deliver a successful product.  

Keep Reading:

How to Determine Timeframe and Scope in Agile Development

How Long Does it Take to Build an App Using Agile Scrum

How to Manage Software Development Risks in an Agile Environment