Agile Methodology Trends 2022 – The Rise of Tech Transformation

In the recent past, companies worldwide were forced to simplify their production, business operation, and other management operations because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This turned the attention of many organizations and businesses towards agile project management. The concept and practices followed under the agile methodology help companies be competitive and adaptable.

In addition, agile practices streamline the business process, productivity, and other operations. It helps project managers identify the problems early and assist the project team in deploying solutions quickly.

This blog covers a detailed view of agile methodology and the emerging agile trends in 2022.

What is Agile Methodology?

Agile methodology is nothing but an iterative approach that breaks down the software development process into several phases and promotes collaborations among team members to build a better software product.

Often agile software development methodology is referred to as the group of software development methodologies that uses iterative development to deliver software products faster and with greater quality.

Here are the integral components of the agile software methodology

• Cross Team Effort • Collaborative Approach • Iteration Development • Continuous Learning & Testing

What Are all Benefits Offered by Agile Methodology?

Agile software methodology is the most preferred and highly recommended software development process. Businesses and organizations conceive this methodology as the evolutionary approach to building better software products on a fast track. Here are a few vital benefits an organization can achieve through the agile development process.

Faster Time to Market: Unlike the traditional development process, agile provides more versatility to software development. The iteration approach of agile helps developers to achieve milestones much quicker and easier. This enables the team to launch the product to the market quickly.

Transparency: Agile process initiates collaborations among the client and developers throughout the project development process. This enables the client to understand the project development process in each state with full transparency.

Predictable Delivery: The iterative approach of the agile process enables the team to predict the exact delivery schedule of the project. The iterative approach allows the team to add new features, prioritize the vital modules, and offer flexibility in prioritizing. Also, it enables the team to update the development process to the stakeholders quickly and frequently.

Predictable Costs: As mentioned early, with the predictable delivery schedule of the project through an iterative approach team can easily predict the exact cost of the development. Moreover, when compared with other methodologies, the cost for the development will be limited in agile.

List of Top Agile Trends in 2022

Digitalization has led to an increase in dynamic and competitive software development. Any company needs to keep itself ahead in this competitive business by keeping up with the recent trends in agile development methodologies that include:

1. Cloud-based Agile System:

Cloud computing is an emerging trend many companies have followed in the last few years. The agile development technology considers using cloud-based solutions to stay ahead in this competitive business. The agile technique implements new innovative thinking, deploying, and testing methods.

These techniques are helpful for the organization in achieving improved quality products, agility, decreased costs, faster response to market, enhanced customer satisfaction, and many other benefits. Due to these advantages, more and more companies are implementing the cloud-based agile system for their growth and development.

2. Implementation of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Methodologies:

Advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are gaining importance in agile development practices. These techniques are preferred as they provide automation and greater accuracy for supporting the data-driven approach. These techniques help in improved decision-making based on the analysis performed.

Implementing these techniques leads to scanning the process to gain insights regarding the vulnerabilities and errors that can adversely affect the process. These tools assist in the creation and execution of automated tests. The AI and ML enable the organization to gain fruitful results and be prepared for agility.

3. Using Simple Agile Tools:

Various tools help the organization with agile development. These tools require technical knowledge and prior learning to handle these tools effectively. Nowadays, more user-friendly tools are developed by having an intuitive interface.

This makes handling the tools easier with reduced difficulties in certain functionalities like task backlogs, issue trackers, dashboards, etc. Newer user-friendly agile tools are coming up, making it easier for the developers to effective agile project management.

4. Workshops and Training Sessions for Short-Term Activities:

The tools and applications used in agile project management require support for handling these applications. The enterprises that need to implement the agile development methodology emphasize providing training sessions or workshops for short-term activities to make the employees acquainted with its functioning.

This helps the agile team gain expertise on specific activities required in the agile development roadmap. The agility team can build their skills and capabilities to improve overall product quality using this facility.

5. Continuous Testing:

Testing the product and the process forms an integral part of the agile method development process. The agile teams within the organization acknowledge the successful outcomes of performing the testing for the product or the process. In agile development, testing is performed at every process development stage.

This results in faster feedback regarding the coding and detection of errors. This leads to improved quality of the product and faster release of the final product. The automated process helps perform continuous testing at a faster rate.

6. Relative Estimations:

Based on the process followed for the product development helps understand the time required for the development and the release of the product or new feature. These estimates increase the pressure on the development teams to ensure meeting the set deadlines for product delivery.

The concept of the agile development process implements relative estimations where it uses the details of the product backlog and compares it with the groups of similar items facing similar difficulty. The different methods are used for the estimation. These techniques include Planning Poker, T-shirt sizing, Async Poker, etc., which estimates the tasks or the items based on the efforts required to complete the process.

7. Expansion of Agile beyond Software Development:

The principles of agility are not confined to just the software development project. These agile techniques can be used in marketing, finances, human resources, etc. The agile team can adopt agile methodologies that involve complex processes.

This agile development process allows the team to handle the complex process by managing their priorities by implementing an iterative approach. This helps the organization be open to the changes they can face in the coming times.

8. Emphasizing the Business Values:

The organization needs to focus on the various factors for agility like the estimation of different metrics that involves returns on investment (ROI), net promoter score (NPS), operational stability, and many such factors.

These metrics help the organization project the business values of the user stories. Soon, the organizations will witness an enhanced emphasis on analyzing and recognizing the business values of the user stories.

9. Design Thinking:

This methodology of design thinking emphasizes developing the product based on the user. It challenges the agile team to develop a product that meets the requirements set by the users.

This process helps the organization in attempting to understand the needs. Based on this, they can identify and implement the new strategies for finding the solution for providing a new perspective to the available approach. This methodology helps develop the product for the end-users by considering their thought process, needs, and requirements.

10. Agile at Scale:

Most companies have started implementing the agile development process for their products and services. This implementation of the agile methodology is easy but needs to use the scaled framework. The use of this framework helps the organization define the short-term achievement of agile development.

It becomes easier for the organization to achieve and track these short-term objectives. This also helps in the efficient development of the product by performing the tests at various levels.

11. Combination of DevOps and Agile:

The development teams' main aim is to build feature-rich agile solutions for product development. As this project development process moves forward, there is an increase in complexities and the increased chances of unforeseen, unintended, and unfavorable outcomes.

This required testing techniques for the software during its pre-release stage. Implementing the collaborative workflow in this development phase can help fast-track, leading to a decrease in product development time. DevOps helps shorten the development timeframes for faster delivery of the newer improved software. Combining the DevOps with Agile leads to delivering software with improved quality.

Bottom Line

Agile methodology keeps evolving with emerging trends to make the development process much better than ever. With such trends, the future of the software development process is more promising and easier.

Overall, the agile process is an exciting method of developing a better software product. The above-listed emerging agile trends of 2022 will produce great results for the organizations.