Agile software development has emerged out to be one of the most widely used software development approach followed now-a-days. As per a survey, it has been reported that most of the companies involved in software development business makes use of agile methodology to forego with their clients project.

Agile software development emerged as an inspiration from Waterfall model used in custom application development process. The waterfall model is the traditional method of developing software. In case of waterfall model, one has to follow step-by-step approach to complete with the whole life cycle of software development. This means that firstly, the requirement gathering phase should be completed and then only one can move to the next phase of designing. Once the designing is over, then comes coding. After the completion of coding phase, testing phase will appear and in this way, software development life cycle phases are covered in waterfall approach. This way of development has many drawbacks like one can not move forward to the next level unless and until the previous phase is completed.

Moreover, there can be situation where the final product gets delivered correctly but then it took long time for development. Now, in this case, what if that the developed product or the software is of no use to the consumers. The consumers are looking for some advanced version of that product. That means a change in consumer behavior can result in sheer wastage of the product developed using waterfall model.

So, to overcome all these situations in an outsourced product development companies, agile software development came into picture. Agile methodology takes care of all these things. It works with the principle of following iterations during the development of software. Iteration is a short timeframe that usually lasts from one to four weeks depending on the complexity of project. A single team works on the particular iteration which helps reduce the overall risk of the project and increases adaptability. At the end of each iteration, we finally get an available release with minimal bugs. It is not necessary that each iteration ends up in a release that is ready for market. Summarily, the following steps are followed in agile methodology :-
1. Once the planning process is complete, the iteration process begins. Here the task is to estimate the amount of work required to complete each requirement.
2. Once the work has been estimated, it’s time to model the iteration. Plan the work for iteration; create a model that is good enough to create good estimates.
3. Complete the Test Driven Design
Some of the advantages of following this methodology are :-
• Agile methodology adopts an adaptive team approach which can easily co-ordinate and respond back with the change in requirements.
• It takes care of optimal time and effort investment & therefore can easily track the changing market behavior.
• As clients continuously provide their feedbacks as well as inputs so there is no space left for guesswork.
• The documentation is up to the mark, thus, saving time.
• The final product is of high quality developed or designed in least possible time frame.
All these above features finally ensure in getting a Happy & satisfied Customer.

Authors Bio:
Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been demonstrating her writing skills by writing the articles for outsourcing software development companies like Q3 technologies from last two years. She also has a keen interest in writing stuff for warehousing management related firms.
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