Agile Software Development – 5 Trends to Watch Out For In 2019

Agile software development methodology has equipped IT service providers with greater flexibility to respond to changes. It also promotes collaboration among teams for greater innovation.

In this post, you will find 5 latest agile development trends that will dominate the IT industry in 2019.

1) Agile Maturity Model

The agile development teams are now being evaluated on the basis of their maturity in following agile practices and processes.

The Agile Maturity Model signifies the maturity of a software development team in terms of adhering to the processes, practices, and values required for agile development. In simpler terms, it is an assessment of a software development team to evaluate their agile capabilities.

On the basis of the maturity of an agile development team following levels are defined:

Level 1-Initial

At this level, a software development team lacks consistency and requires training to get everyone aligned with agile development principles.

Level 2-Beginner

At this level, the processes are yet to be fully defined. There is a basic level of agile adoption when it comes to development and testing.

Level 3-Defined

The team at this level will be working with well-defined agile processes. The team is consistent in delivering sprint after sprint.

Level 4 – Measured

There are metrics to measure the code quality and the focus is on engineering maturity.

Level 5-Optimizing

The team is capable to develop as per schedule and release as per demand. The delivery is consistent across teams.  The teams are self-organized and focus on continuous improvement on the basis of KPIs. For continuous integration and deployment, investments in automation are made.

2) Distributed Agile Teams

The agile project teams are now distributed across different locations. The developers and testers are not necessarily collocated or working in the same time zone. These teams need to be self-organized and they require the right tool for distributed teams to collaborate with each other.

The distributed agile teams are increasing at a fast pace.  It is difficult to get all the people with all the right skill sets at a single location. Developing truly global software requires professionals from different cultures and speaking different languages to collaborate.

3) Scaling agile

Scaling agile implicates that a large number of agile teams are working in different business units of an organization. The agile practices are now going beyond the agile software development projects to facilitate an organization-wide agile transformation.

By scaling agile, organizations are able to deploy agile teams throughout the organization in different business units.  The main reason to scale agile is to fuel innovation across different business units in an organization. (Read more: Mastering the craft of scaling agile with ReQtest)

4) Cloud-Based Solutions for agile development

Cloud-Based solutions are now dominating agile development projects. The advantage of using cloud-based solutions for agile development is a significant reduction in time required to code, test, and deploy software.

Apart from boosting efficiency and reducing cost, a cloud-based tool increases the scalability of the agile project teams. The agile development team can gain a competitive advantage by using cloud-based solutions that give access to world-class enterprise technology.

5) Continuous Testing

Continuous testing in an agile development project refers to incorporating automation tools in the delivery pipeline and running them frequently. The results from automation tests are inspected regularly to minimize the risks.

As a part of Continuous Integration, multiple virtual test environments are set up. The quality of code is improved before it goes into testing. This help to reduce the regression rate and the testing efforts required.

Summary

These trends will set the direction for the upcoming innovations in the agile world. ReQtest is a cloud-based tool that is well equipped to support distributed agile teams and plays an instrumental role in scaling agile. You can sign up for a free trial to explore more benefits of ReQtest.