Agile Dependability
During our time designing and developing digital solutions, brand identities and marketing schematics, we’ve certainly grown alongside our work. As such, it’s become clear that the road to our ultimate success lies most heavily in how we choose to approach our work.
What unifies the success between our bigger government and large business projects, like Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, Bradford Council and Candy Kittens, to our collaboration with local SMEs like Northern Lights and Fort, is the way we approach creating a scope, identifying project attributes and the challenges we may face.
At 6B, we initially chose to adopt a relatively popular agile methodology when developing solutions. From this, we have sculpted and further refined our methods to become uniquely; the 6B way. In today’s article we’d like to take a look at what makes agile development so successful and what makes 6B’s agile dependability different.
What is Agile Methodology?
Agile methodology came as a response to the classic development structure of the waterfall approach. This approach was largely inefficient and error prone as developers would have to refer to a, usually large and wordy, specification that would be broken down into tasks and requirements.
If anything about the specification required changing, the process of discussion, confirmation, change, and then application was long and subject to miscommunication and tight deadlines. Agile development offered a breath of fresh air and the breadth to be flexible and versatile by instead, creating a hoisting scope of the project that could be easily adapted as the project grew in size and complexity.
Agile methodology increases quality and reduces development time by breaking projects down, defining users and audiences, creating a vision, and outlining potential issues right from the get go. Once development is ready to begin, this is further broken down into ‘scrums’ and ‘sprints’ making tracking, reporting, testing and verifying seamless and adaptable.
Agile Dependability
So what makes 6B’s approach different? Ultimately, we aim to be as dynamic and versatile as possible, meaning that we don’t box our process in with ‘best practices’, and approach every project uniquely; seeking to understand the constraints within which we’re working and build systems within them. This we call agile dependability, reflecting both our aim to be trustworthy in the eyes of our clients and partners, and reliable in our long-term relationships. Additionally, it encompasses our holistic approach to engineering which considers the solution’s availability, reliability, and its maintainability.
Change and compromise are inevitable in any project, so we present trade-offs clearly and objectively, allowing everyone to reach agreements and work in complete collaboration with our client and their teams. This is supported by our philosophy of practical engineering by beginning with making the most effective possible use of a team, optimising delivery capabilities. We work with a focus on operability – always looking ahead to the operation, monitoring, and ultimate purpose of a system. We think in terms of service delivery, not just software engineering.
Agile dependability ensures complete alignment between all parties, total transparency and open communication. This offers a rounded view or scope of the project ahead which will ultimately enable us to refine, evaluate and de-risk the component problems.
Our clients benefit from our unique blend of the most effective elements of various techniques including Scrum, Kanban, XP, optimising product teams, squads and agile reporting. Our creative approach to working methods often leaves a lasting legacy on the inventiveness, efficiency and culture of collaboration in organisations we work with.
As a result, our teams are flexible, versatile, adaptable and able to seamlessly deliver opaque and complex projects to otherwise, tight and unforgiving deadlines. Our approach isn’t set in stone, and it will continue to grow and change alongside our teams, ensuring we are always delivering projects to the highest standards.