Any agile development project requires careful planning and consideration, so it’s worthwhile knowing some key questions that should be asked in advance of starting a successful working relationship. Agile can work to bring immeasurable success for your business, but it’s worth remembering the steps to consider, ensuring you make the most of any project. In this article, we will look at answering some key issues around choosing an agile development company.

Have you completed any projects in the past similar to my requirement? Can you walk me through the process you followed?

In any industry one of the first ports of call when looking to hire someone is taking into account past work experience. You need to know they’re qualified,  and this is particularly important when you’re using agile within a distributed workflow – it goes without saying that everyone must know everyone else’s skills within a team!

You’ll also need to ask how long the iterations of separate projects were – look for deadlines met to fixed iterations, and feel comfortable questioning people further in long iterations are discussed.

What Project Management tools do you use?

Get a sense of what tools and standardised practises the team you’re hiring has experience in. Differentiating in types of tools and whether this is a good fit for your project and company is important as it’ll allow them to become more productive and keep track far easier.

PM tools such as Jira Agile, Rally and Pivotal Tracker are all multi-levelled PM tools with flexible pricing plans. At Classic Informatics, we have our own custom Agile project management tool so that we can customize Agile to clients' need precisely.

Part of choosing an agile development company that’s going to fit with you is being able to talk in the same language when it comes to project management.

Do you use any automated testing tools? How do you manage test cases?

At some stage within past processes and projects, it’s expected that most developers would have had experience in testing with automated tools. At the end of each stage, or iteration of the project, it makes sense to have something to show the clients – and this cannot be done until that iteration is properly tested. The ever-changing nature of Agile means that as a potential client, your proposed agile development company will need to have a good understanding of various aspects of testing – from automatic regression and continuous integration to performance management tools and techniques.

Does the team have Agile certified developers and managers?

Scrum is the leading framework for agile development software, and you will need to make sure anyone you build a relationship with in terms of agile has a good understanding of Scrum management and organization. Find out how they’ve organized projects in the last in terms of a scrum framework – or if they’ve used any other processes like AUP or XP. Finding the right fit for your objectives here is important. Look at how you work as a team and discuss operating practises.

How do you accommodate customer feedback in the process?

As a company looking to hire an agile developer, it makes it a lot easier if the company in question encourages feedback and comments from you, the client. The planning, testing and documentation of agile development processes is very important – and you should feel that throughout these stages you have an input that will be valued extensively and taken into consideration.

At the end of each iteration these processes should be followed and as the client you should have input and feedback into this, as is the case with Classic Informatics.

Different Agile Development Approaches

The different potential approaches to agile development will become important when it comes to choosing a company to work for you. In this table below we show a little about what each approach means for you, and the potential benefits for you.

Conclusion

Twinning agile development with the right strategy and experts on board will, over a certain period, save money and a huge amount of time. As a business looking for a potential partner in terms of agile development, you need to make sure you pick the right strategies and ask the right questions to get the best out of your project. If you need to talk or discuss your plan of action in this area, Classic Informatics can help.