Building an agile culture is our mission
At Axon Active, we talk long-term. This is why Agile for us, is not a set of rules or prescriptive doctrine that our engineers must follow. We focus on building our Agile culture where you can see the traits of Agile in everyone’s work, not just Agile in software development, and where Agile can help us do our work better. Watch our Scrum tutorials
Agile Manifesto
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more
Why we recommend Agile in software development?
Absolute transparency
Full involvement throughout the project
Intense collaboration between development team and stakeholders
High flexibility to adjust in cases of changes
Early and predictable delivery of shippable product
Estimable costs and schedule of release
Increasing business value
Greater focus on user insights
Better product quality
Our practices of Agile in software development
Since 2008, our engineer teams have been using different agile framework and approaches in working with foreign partners and clients:
Scrum
DevOps
Kanban
Scrumban
Test-driven development
Behavior-driven development
Acceptance test-driven development
Our strong agile culture is built up and excelled by each of our employees. A member’s journey to Agile begins with several trainings before they start working, so that they could understand the idea of Agile and the effect of an appropriate working process on product quality. For their first month of working, our Agile coach attends every meeting of the team to ensure the engineers are doing Agile right. In the next few months, after the team has a certain confidence in agile working, they are offered chances to join our courses where they can enhance their knowledge about Scrum, Kanban practices and agile leadership and discover how to change their behavior from waterfall thinking to agile thinking.
We believe in Scrum
Scrum is the most popular and effective Agile framework for complex software development projects. At Axon Active, all of our development teams are working based on the Agile mindset and Agile methodologies, with approximately 80% of them choosing Scrum. Scrum provides a way for development team to track the progress of current tasks and allow you to allocate your resources better. It also promotes strong collaboration and frequent communication between team members, leading to a happier and more productive team. Our software engineer teams have been using Scrum frameworks for more than 9 years and have the suitable skills to work alongside with you and deliver the benefits of Scrum to your business.
Benefits of Scrum in software development
Increased team satisfaction
Unlike other project management methodologies which draw the fine line between client and development team, Scrum gathers the two parties under one roof and form a “Scrum team”. Scrum is beneficial to both sides of the scrum team. For Client, being able to collaborate with the development team through every sprint allows them to control the outcome of the project and has complete visibility in the evolution of the product and progress made. For developers, open end date and full support from other team members remove many frustrations experienced with other development methodologies.
Enhanced team productivity
Scrum emphasizes the creation of tangible deliverables. This is rewarding for the development team and eliminates distractions and additional work to boost productivity. For example, eliminating lengthy, complex and rapidly obsolete documentation about product requirements and design increase productivity and tangible output for the team. Scrum encourages real-time communication between people to minimize waste from miscommunication. A Product Owner will write brief requirement descriptions (stories), and elaborate on the details as needed in discussion with team members.
Better product quality
Applications are developed in Scrum through small and regular incremental sprints where stories (project descriptions) are continually tested at the end. A story is not “done” unless it satisfies all the requirements as defined in the test cases. This practice allows testers to detect bugs and issues at an early stage when they are easier to fix and ensures that each story implementation is of the highest quality at the time of its completion.
Rapid response to changes
Changes are welcomed in Scrum, and the way Scrum permits quick response to changes is to break the project into short development cycles (sprints) which usually last from 2-4 weeks. Each sprint is comprised of “Plan, Do, Check, Act” with continuous meetings to synchronize and review work of each part. New features are delivered and defects are identified and fixed before moving on to the next sprint. This means that when changes are required, implementation can be done within the next sprint. In addition, Scrum requires Product Owners to prepare Product backlogs with user stories arranged in priority order which allows the development team to focus on the right tasks. The combination of short development cycles and ranking of requirements improves responsiveness to changes.
Complete Transparency
Scrum provides maximum visibility into project progress to all stakeholders, i.e. client and outsourcing team. Transparency is provided via frequent status update during meetings throughout the software outsourcing development cycle. An often used practice of Scrum team is to post index cards with the current story and task status, along with the current burndown chart which is a bar or line chart showing the amount of work remaining in the current sprint in a public location. This helps the Product Owner track the progress and the Scrum Master manage the process.
Financial benefits
Scrum delivers sizable financial benefits for organizations, though they rarely receive much attention. For example, improved quality of software products eventually leads to more sales, reduced support costs, and limited or no negative publicity/customer perception. Quick reaction to changes in market and customer demand is another key benefit of Scrum. Market demands change often; responsiveness provides a significant competitive advantage. Scrum also drives risk avoidance. The level of collaboration within the outsourcing team allows clients to make sure the business objectives are understood and applied to the project.