Why Agile?

As a software evangelist who has experienced the evolution of software development methodologies, it is easy to see and understand the benefits of the Agile movement. However, our business colleagues are typically less interested in iterations, increments, pair-programming, TDD, etc. So, how do you go about explaining why your IT team is going through a massive change and what the upside will be? Well, here are some ways that I've found effective in the past:

• Delivering Exactly What You Need - working closely with business users throughout the project, refining requirements and deploying the most useful features first
  
• Reducing Time To Market - delivering effective solutions early, building additional features in stages and stopping when it's good enough
• Building Higher Quality Solutions - minimising live issues through collaborative teamwork and solid engineering principles

And if that's not enough, we would of course expect to see:

• An increase in customer satisfaction
• Better resource utilisation
• A reduction in software maintenance costs 
  

Agile is not a silver bullet, but it does tick all of the right boxes.