Building new software features and functions continuously is vital to stay competitive. Learn how agile development helps teams deliver big projects faster.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Much of the software development world has adopted new methodologies, such as agile, that enable them to deliver changes and updates to critical systems more quickly and efficiently. In this 2-part blog series, I explain what agile development is and how it helps deliver software faster and then explore how you can implement this approach in SAP. Let’s start with the basics. Agile is an approach to software development that prioritizes small, frequent product releases over huge development cycles. Instead of large, complex projects that take several months, projects are broken up into smaller units of work that can be delivered much faster. These units are expressed as user stories, which detail something a user wants to accomplish with the system. The user story should be clearly explained with well-defined outcomes and tell the developers who the user is, what they want to achieve, and why it matters to them. For example, a user story might be: “As a manager, I want to know how many days of vacation remain untaken by my staff this year, so that I can plan our capacity to take on new projects.” Agile development methods date back to the 1990s. In 2001, a group of developers published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, more commonly known as the “ Agile Manifesto.
