Agile Development

Agile provides a framework for lean software development that minimises risk and maximises flexibility. Incorporating techniques such as Continuous Delivery it provides a set of guiding principles based around regular customer feedback and responsiveness to change that ensures features with the most value are delivered first for the greatest business gains.

If any of the following points apply to you, adopting Agile can have a hugely positive impact on your projects:

• You have a fixed deadline
• Your requirements are not always fully defined up front
• You would like to see regular demos
• You would relish the flexibility to make changes during development
• You need to get your project to market quickly

Combining elements of the popular Scrum framework together with our own expertise and experience, we've created a high-performance, tailored Agile process.

We've taken the strengths of the methodology – its focus on communication, regular reviews and overall flexibility – so that we're able to pass on the benefits of Agile to our clients while ensuring it fits with your working practices.

We work closely with your team to define and prioritise your business requirements. Each requirement has detailed acceptance criteria and we develop within short fixed iterations, so planning and review meetings (including demos and lessons learnt) will occur more regularly than with traditional approaches.

Working with clients to develop user stories through rapid requirements gathering workshops, we produce high level specifications and release schedules which act as Agile “blueprints” for development that ensure cost and scope can be estimated early and key delivery milestones will be met.

We create interactive UX prototypes and technical design specifications in a lightweight pre-production phase to plan and prioritise requirements. Rapid, iterative workshops, video conference calls, sprint planning and review meetings facilitate an inclusive and open working environment where collaboration is key.

Using an iterative and incremental sprint-based model, project managers expertly qualified in Agile methodologies guide the project through key milestones with regular walk-through demos and retrospectives to show progress and steer development. The close relationship between your team and Box UK ensures you get continuous feedback and visibility on a day-to-day basis for optimal transparency.

With user acceptance testing carried out more evenly throughout the project as part of demos and reviews, we typically release working products at the end of every 2-week sprint. The Agile approach essentially guarantees that projects will be delivered to deadlines enabling you to go live if necessary at any stage during the development process.

The benefits of working with Agile are many and varied:

• Flexibility
• Regular communication and review
• Shorter feedback cycles
• More rapid development timescales
• Regular demos to show progress
• Ability to steer development
• Reduced financial risk
• Greater return on investment

To find out more about how Agile can help you improve the speed and quality of your software deliveries, read our white paper "Five Signs Your Web Project Needs Agile".