Using Agile Development for Your Web-based Product

With most of the products or projects your company handles, there is a clear, definitive roadmap to follow: Define-Design-Build-Test-Deploy.

But what about your website or your Web-based product? Can you employ the same type of methodology to achieve your end-goal? Of course not, because you know that the Web is ever evolving. The requirements you conceive will be obsolete by the time the product is launched, and your funding will dry up while you try to adapt.

Enter Agile. Software developers have been utilizing Agile methodology since the mid-90s, but you can use many of the same ideas for building and maintaining your Web-based project.

Instead of taking five months, 12 months, two years to drag a project through the roadmap from Define to Deploy, Agile is a recurring, constantly mobile process that completes the cycle multiple times until the team achieves the desired end-product.

By cycling through week-long iterations of defining, designing, building, testing, and deploying, you know the product’s limitations, what it will look like, and its usefulness to the customer.  The key component to the success of the project is customer input. When you have something to show them after only spending a week on it, you can build that customer feedback into the next iteration’s set of requirements.

For example, say your product is a website that aggregates the day’s headlines for your city from various news sources. After a week, you have a version to show. Your customer says it would be helpful if users could rank the news stories, so the most read and most popular ones show first. It’s a simple fix that you can implement immediately into the next definition phase.

The sooner you receive customer input, the more successful your project will be. And from the customers’ point of view, they now have a vested interest in the success of the project. They provided input; they want it to work.

Have you used Agile-or something similar-for your company’s projects? How has it worked for you?

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Using Agile Development for Your Web-based Product. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com