What was broken, that we needed to fix?

As I eluded in the past chapter, some fundamental things were being seen in the late 90’s/early 2000’s with the rise of software development teams.

• Long planning and research cycles meant actual releasing of application to the customer was delayed, so things were documented internally in the company but the customer wasn’t seeing anything
• If a change to the application need to be made once it was released, this also took a long time as people with individual skills meant work had to be passed team to team, as designers and developers were not communicating
• Business process often got in the way of what the customer actually needed, with software developers simply following plans (often from many months and years ago) without listening to what customers were saying recently or what the recent market trends were telling them they should adapt their plans to

Along came ‘agile’ software development. This mindset and these techniques can help you overcome the problems I listed above.

Agile software development

Agile software development is a modern, iterative approach to software development that emphasises flexibility and adaptability. Unlike traditional waterfall software development, which follows a linear, sequential process, agile development is an iterative process, puts people with multiple skills into the same team, and allow them to respond to change more quickly and effectively.

Agile development came about as a response to the limitations and drawbacks of traditional waterfall development. As I described above, in waterfall development each phase of the development process (such as planning, design, coding, testing, and deployment) is completed in separate teams and done before moving on to the next phase.

Agile development, on the other hand, is based on the Agile Manifesto; a set of principles for software development that emphasise collaboration, customer satisfaction, and flexibility.

Some of the core beliefs of agile development include valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, and responding to change over following a plan.

How do I apply this to my own no-code business, or being productive?

In agile development, teams work in short iterations typically of 2-weeks, or ‘Sprints’, to develop software incrementally. After these 2-weeks they aim to release software to the customer.

The most popular Agile framework to work in this is Scrum.

At the start of each Sprint they prioritise features based on customer needs and feedback, and work to deliver a working product based on this at the end of each sprint. This approach allows teams to respond to change and feedback more quickly, and to deliver a product that better meets the needs of customers.

✨ If you want to apply a Sprint-based approach to your productivity workflow using the Scrum framework, I have built this in a Notion template here 👇

<aside> 👉 Scrum Notion template here

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Overall, agile development is a more flexible, adaptive, and customer-focused approach to software development, and is increasingly popular in the technology industry.