Apps development loves agile methods

Mobile Apps Market is highly competitive, with many investors and a significant growing rate. Establishing a dominant position in these conditions is difficult and requires extremely short time to market to prevent loss of interest from the users and consequently waste of these investments. To ensuring ‘short time to market’, you need an App release plan based on two to three week iterations and a really short analysis-development-test cycle. The classic waterfall methodology is no longer an option for these type of software. We could as far as saying that this is a strategic error. Apps development needs continuous feedbacks in order to work properly. How to maintain control on these types of new development paradigms? Do we need to search for other project management methods? The answer is simpler than we can think: ‘Apps Love Agile!’ There’s no need to look for new development paradigms or methodologies. Agile methodologies help us democratize the management processes, focusing on transparency, collaboration and incremental development. The most important principle of Agile Methods is creating value, these practices allow us improving benefit/cost ratio, increasing productivity and decreasing the time cycle, simplifying bureaucracy in production and promoting short iteration and two-week based release planning. Agile does not mean ‘no control over project!’. Agile and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) are often bounded concepts, complementary for the success of a project. The ALM is the process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and, last but not least, maintenance. The main goal is tracking requirement from generic objectives up to requirement, code, acceptance test and the history of the project. Software vendors are ready for the challenge and they promote tools and practices to automate the processes and help keeping on the flow of information between the relevant actors who drive these changes. Are you ready for this app challenge?