Agile software development also known as “agile” is not just a suite of tools or any kind of methodology, but rather a philosophy that was put into paper back in the year 2001 within 17 signatories.

1. Importance & Benefits of Agile Methodology
Agile software development also known as “agile” is not just a suite of tools or any kind of methodology, but rather a
philosophy that was put into paper back in the year 2001 within 17 signatories. It was an essential move from the
heavy document oriented software development methodologies, for instance waterfall in general use at the time. A
survey that was conducted by Dr.Dobb’s Journal reflects 41 percent of the development projects today adopted agile
methodology and agile techniques are used on 65 percent of projects.
Agile methodology embraces the iterations. Small teams work together with stakeholders in defining fast
prototypes, concept proofs and other visual mediums define the concern for being resolved. The team defined the
needs for iterations, generates the code and then defines and runs the incorporated test scripts and the users. The
verification takes place way earlier in the development procedure than it happens in case of the waterfall technique,
enabling stakeholders to fine-tune needs while they are simple to change.
Today service providers specializing in application lifecycle management have come with agile solutions based on
SCRUM methodology to deploy multiple tools required to execute Agile on a distributed development platform. The
distinguishing aspect of advanced agile solutions than the generic ones lies in the configurability and it can be
extended and further configured to integrate any organizational requirement that goes beyond the definition of
SCRUM and Agile methodology.
Agile solutions offered by ALM service providers have unique features, such as a requirements traceability relation,
that enables feature linking between user stories and other sprints, risks and backlog. This is also an inbuilt version
along with an explicit and implicit locking mechanism. This further enables in tracking former versions, comparisons
between two versions, and a version diagram to highlight the progression, cloning of artifacts and merging the
versions.
In addition to all these, one of the most important features of high-end agile methodologies is process automation
that is obtained using a process engine. There is also a drag-and-drop graphic designer that is used, to design an
Agile procedure and then to execute, enforce and automate the same. This process further creates tasks
automatically for one or more than one user based on the roles they play. As soon as the tasks are completed the
process further sets up a new task for new users. This apart the solution comprises several reporting engines, such as
HTML, Crystal, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.