Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program

One of the perks of working in a startup is to experience agile development of the product. In a small team, where many projects on the same product are working in parallel. These projects can vary based on the feature and the type of work being performed on the code. Respective teams can work on different parts of the code like the maintenance team can take up the job of fixing bugs and the product development team can work on the next phase development of some other feature.

The above phenomenon is known as Parallel Development where the same related code base is worked upon by different teams at the same time and the respective efforts are then merged on the production. In an era of Digital Transformation, where the expectation of the clients are all time high, integration of various application tools and services demand more structure and coordination than ever.

So what is a typical development process used for single project development?

If you have a dedicated code base for a project then the ideal development process followed is known as Linear Development. In this type of development, the progression remains linear in nature resulting in successive versions adding more to the previous version. The configuration and project planning, in this case, is straightforward.

Why Parallel Development?

There are many reasons why parallel development may be necessary for a project. These include:

• Version controlling
• Release Planning
• Post Release planning (Bug fixes)
• Sprint Planning for module vs team effort estimation
• Successful deployment in the client environment

The parallel development lead to benefits in terms of reduced complexity, faster integration processes, constraint testing and automation.

• Reduction in Complexity – Different project entities like project size, team size and feature development acts as a decisive point here. The simulation of different testing environments and necessary API document exchange at the beginning of integration can lead to transparent discussion in terms of technical requirements by respective teams.
• Third Party integration – A planned approach here to streamline time to time communication between third-party vendor, client and developers, in the beginning, reduce unnecessary friction and blame game in case any of the teams feel the documentation was incomplete or difficult to understand at the beginning of the document exchange process.
• Eliminate Constraints – One of the constraints that can lead to project failure is incomplete and vaguely captured requirements. There should be a detailed discussion to close the requirements gathering phase first followed by an approval from the client. The same also goes in the case integration documentation. Other constraints may include use case designing which is dependant on the requirements gathering phase.

It is by implementing the right systems, services and test teams which results in the dramatic increase in the productivity of the developers. The parallel agile development allows both the macro and micro parallel development processes to achieve the project completion in due duration. However, I came across pieces while I was researching on this topic which stated completely different stories. As per their articles, it might not always help to adopt agile methodology.

P.C. Freepik