Agile Mobile Application Development has emerged as a leading development methodology over the last decade. Currently, over 71% of all U.S companies employ Agile development in some shape or form.
What’s the reason behind its growing popularity? Agile ensures quick and efficient application development that successfully incorporates stakeholder feedback and can deliver substantially better results.
Agile methodology is known to be more successful than any other competing methodology (like the Waterfall Model) in terms of its effectiveness, agility, and revenue-boosting capabilities. Before delving deeper into the benefits of adopting Agile development in your organization, let us fully understand what the methodology is and how it helps streamline development workflows.
What is Agile Mobile Application Development?
Agile is an iterative product development methodology centered on efficiency and stakeholder feedback. Unlike other methodologies, Agile allows a development team to constantly test and release small, but presentable parts of the applications called modules to different stakeholders (company executives, organizations commissioning the project, and test users) and gain valuable feedback. This feedback is then used to make adjustments that the current module may need and incorporated into all future modules for streamlined development.
Scrum is currently the most widely used version of the Agile methodology. Each iteration of a Scrum Agile Mobile Application Development cycle is called a sprint. Each sprint lasts for a short, defined period of time (usually two to four weeks) and is assigned a clear goal and completion date. While the methodology is prone to slight variations across different organizations, the general stages of a Scrum Agile development sprint are:
- Requirement Planning: All the goals of the sprint are clearly laid down in this phase. These are defined by the team leader (known as the Scrum Master) and/or the stakeholders.
- Development: The agreed-upon module is coded by the developers in this phase.
- Testing: The finished module is tested for bugs, errors, and other discrepancies. The module must meet the defined end goal of the sprint.
- Delivery: The module is delivered to stakeholders for review or is deployed onto a finished product as an update upon approval.
- Feedback Incorporation: Stakeholder feedback is incorporated in both the module and the sprint workflow. For instance, if a module is deemed to be too UI-focused and not functional enough, development teams are instructed to allocate more time to module planning.
In this way, the final product is developed through a series of iterative sprints that allow stakeholders to constantly monitor and test the product and give constructive feedback. This ensures that the product is usable and completely launch-ready upon completion.
The benefits of Agile Mobile App Development
Agile Mobile Application Development offers several functional and operational benefits to organizations. Some of them are:
- Quality Product development
Products developed through the Scrum Agile methodology are inherently superior to those developed through other processes. This is because Agile allows development teams to focus on small tasks and incorporate user feedback to ensure that every module of the product is usable and responsive and meets all user expectations.
- Customization
Agile’s constant feedback incorporation mechanism allows executives and other stakeholders to customize their products in real-time. It gives users the ability to test out products and make practical suggestions that help customize the product for enhanced usability. The result is a fully customized application that is built to serve explicit consumer demand.
- Swift Return on Investment
Iterative delivery mechanisms allow stakeholders to closely monitor the project process and calculate their return on investment. This helps with transparent, need-based budgeting, which ultimately serves to save operational costs and help the project manager justify funding to higher-ranking executives.
- Reduced Risks
Scrum Agile’s iterative delivery also ensures minimal launch risks, which helps the organization release the product almost immediately upon completion. Comprehensive risk assessment is carried out by stakeholders after each iteration and the feedback is communicated to the Scrum Master, who then ensures timely incorporation. This helps development teams understand market risks better and constantly streamline development strategies to adapt to them.
Benefits of combining Flutter and Scrum Agile Methodology
Flutter’s revolutionary cross-platform development framework allows developers to utilize the Scrum Agile methodology to the fullest. Flutter’s fully-customizable widgets allow developers to swiftly incorporate user feedback onto the mobile app.
Other important features like Hot Reload allow developers to make and monitor all changes in real-time for swift risk assessment at the end of each iteration. Agile teams working with Flutter have the benefit of having their customization and feedback-based development methodology backed by a fully-customizable development platform that allows for seamless collaboration.
Somnio’s expert Flutter development teams use Scrum Agile to deliver best-in-class cross-platform applications for your application. Our extensive service experience coupled with Scrum Agile’s enhanced productivity ensures the on-time and risk-averse delivery of all your mobile apps.
