Agile development methodologies grew out as a method to meet the challenges and limitations brought by conventional waterfall software development. It can be defined as a software developmental approach stressing on incremental delivery, team collaboration, continual planning, and continual learning. Despite the many advantages that agile software development service offers it also poses a lot of challenges that prevent many companies from successfully adapting it to their advantage.  Here are the few benefits and challenges offered by agile software development.

Benefits of Agile Development

Agile software development offers many benefits to the team as well as the organization it is part of. It helps many teams to avoid the major pitfalls like cost, schedule predictability and scope infringement which accompanies other traditional software development models in Dubai. Here are 5 major benefits offered by agile methodology.  

1. Improved Quality: One of the principal benefits offered by agile methodology is the improvement in product quality. By carefully segmenting the project into manageable units, the development team can concentrate on quality improvement, testing and creating a collaborative environment for the team. Quality improvement is achieved by producing frequent builds, continuous testing, identifying and fixing defects quickly.
2. Focusing on Value: Another important benefit offered by Agile is an increased focus on providing value by bringing in all the business stakeholder in to the development process. Thereby the team understand the order of priority and provide the best value to their organization.
3. Prioritize the User: The basis of defining product features in agile development is the acceptance of user stories. By concentrating more on what user needs helps incrementally delivering value in each feature. It also provides the opportunity to allow the software to undergo the beta test after each sprint, helping to earn valuable feedback very early on and providing the ability to make changes as required.
4. Stakeholder Involvement: Agile software development allows the involvement of stakeholder in every step of the software development process which forges a collaborative environment for the various teams. The advantage that it offers is that it provides more opportunities for the team to truly understand the business’ vision, deliver quality product features on time, and increases stakeholders’ trust and collaborative spirit.
5. Room for Change: Unlike waterfall model there is always room for change in agile software development. While the team need to deliver a previously agreed upon set of features, there is opportunities for continuous refinement and re-prioritization. New or reviews items can be scheduled for the next iteration so that newer changes can be introduced in a matter of few weeks.     

Challenges of Agile Development  

Despite the many benefits of agile software development, many software development companies in Dubai small and large cited the following challenges faced in the adoption of agile software development. 

1. Change can be difficult: People are naturally averse to change and when faced with agile transformation, people can be very headstrong. Accepting change requires embracing uncertainty and accepting the possibility that what works now might not be the best way.  
2. Lack of skilled product owners from the business side: Most business stakeholder and Business Analysts (BA) are unfamiliar with agile development. They fail to realize the importance of user stories and cling on to the business requirement document (BRD). Also they tend to use the Microsoft Word and Excel to author requirements. Whereas, the agile software development teams use Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools. This mismatch brings in a lot of stress during collaboration.