The agile development process and CPD are a perfect pairing.

In the world of software development, the agile Development Process has quickly become the gold standard of quality and efficiency. By shifting focus away from inflexible long-term goals, agile allows teams to communicate effectively with consumers and with each other, resulting in optimized software that perfectly serves user needs.

However, some organizations may still have questions about agile, and how to best maximize its effects.

In this post, I’ll go over some fundamentals: 

• What is the agile development process? 
• What are the benefits?
• What is Continuous Product Design, and how can it extend the value of agile development?

What is the agile Development Process?

The agile Development Process started as an operational approach to product development—basically, it’s a set of frameworks and practices that can help developers work together in a self-organizing and collaborative fashion.

In practice, this means that a product goes through several iterations before it can be considered “complete,” with each iteration improving upon the last.

A continuous, incremental process ensures that every new version of a product is immediately available for use. Consumer feedback is a fluid, intuitive process, one that allows teams to respond to change without having to overhaul an entire project. By working in short “sprints,” developers can easily analyze market conditions and user needs, while still staying on track to meet long-term goals.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, the agile Development Process has been adopted by many organizations across the globe. Its fluid approach to product development, as well as a focus on short-term “deliverables” (as opposed to a single, finalized product), is especially helpful in allowing teams to respond to consumer needs. 

What Are the Benefits of agile Development?

When used in combination with other techniques, the agile Development Process can have many positive effects. Its flexible approach to consumer feedback and software development encourages efficiency, communication, and above all, customer satisfaction, making it easier than ever to read changes in the market.

The benefits of this process include:

• Faster time to market,
• Improved customer satisfaction,
• Decreased risk of developer burnout,
• More innovation, and
• Greater flexibility across the board.

What are the limitations of the agile Development Process?

However, there are also a few disadvantages that can potentially come with agile in its simplest form. 

First of all, agile is limited to the development cycle of a software product—it isn’t very helpful for figuring out which projects to prioritize, or which projects will be most helpful to an organization. This can lead to uncertainty and, sometimes, a loss of efficiency between projects.

Secondly, there can be some disconnect when it comes to implementing the agile development process within an organization. Customer reactions can be difficult to assess immediately before and immediately after the development process, and data may end up divided across different teams, enabling miscommunication.

That’s why Continuous Product Design was created—as a way to extend the principles of agile to the entire software development life cycle, as well as to every level of an organization. 

What is Continuous Product Design?

Although agile does its best to streamline the process of software development, it still leaves developers contending with uncertainty: which backlog items will have the biggest impact on customer experience, sales, and company success? Which projects deserve the most time and attention? These questions often force engineers to move forward on guesswork, instead of hard facts.

Continuous Product Design (CPD) is a cross-team approach to building better digital products faster—based on a shared, quantified, and real-time view of customer signals and business impact. CPD embraces: 

• Operating with a realtime and 360-degree view of digital products and the customer experience 
• Automated anomaly detection
• Quantification of business impact
• Monitoring of the experience
• Democratization and integration of the customer experience and data with key business processes

How Can CPD Help Improve the agile Development Process?

With CPD, software developers no longer have to blindly prioritize items in their backlog. Instead, they can reliably quantify the impact of a product before the development process even starts. By connecting with consumers early on in the product life cycle, engineers can easily assess the importance of various projects.

When you extend the agile philosophy throughout an entire organization with CPD, you get a cross-team approach to building better digital products faster, based on a shared, quantified, and real-time view of customer signals and business impact. Everyone has skin in the game.

Learn more about how Continuous Product Design can boost your current agile design process.