What Sets Programmers’ Agile Experience Apart?

By now, most organizations know how crucial agile development is to value delivery and flexibility. 86% of development teams now say they have adopted this methodology, according to a recent study.

As your company optimizes its agile processes, it’s important to bring in objective, outside partners to ensure you’re on the right path. Technology consulting companies can help you avoid falling back into slower waterfall development cycles. They also provide the tech experts necessary to advance your next initiative.

At Programmers, our Agile Experience process combines the best agile methodologies with the teams, tools, coaching, and metrics you need throughout development. The Agile Experience is a comprehensive offering that puts you in the best position to deliver valuable digital products and build a sustainable agile culture within your organization. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the key benefits of Programmers’ Agile Experience and what sets it apart from the other services on the market.

Agile Teams 

As part of the Agile Experience, Programmers provides all the tech experts you need to turn your ideas into digital products. That includes QA analysts, UI & UX specialists, and full-stack developers. 

You’ll also work alongside the professionals who lead agile sprints, such as scrum masters, product owners, and integration managers. We purposefully provide team members with different focuses, such as DevOps and data analytics, giving you a full spectrum of insights.

Every consulting company claims to have exceptional talent, so why are Programmers’ teams a step above the rest? All our team members approach initiatives with a distinctly fast-to-value approach. That means we always look for ways to streamline your path to value, allowing your organization to enjoy advanced capabilities quicker.

Let’s look at an example. One of our clients in the HR field realized its customers needed an alerts and notifications system. The new feature would allow employers to alert workers to unsafe job site conditions or remind them of upcoming events. 

Originally, our client planned to deploy the alerts and notifications system in September. But with our value-driven agile approach, we found ways to reduce development time and maintain a high-quality product. 

We launched the alerts and notifications system in mid-August. Then, we used the weeks saved in early development to iteratively add new features that broadened the product’s appeal, such as adding new supported languages.

The Right Toolset

There are many consulting companies out there that provide tech specialists. However, fewer companies give you all the tools you need to adopt agile processes.

Your organization may just be beginning its agile development journey and need a full suite of tools to make it possible. Programmers provides this software from day one to accelerate your timeline to value. 

Establishing a backlog and task management software such as Azure DevOps is often crucial. Our teams also provide communication software, such as Microsoft Teams, to keep everyone in the loop on progress. Of course, software development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio are also provided. 

Does your organization already have development and communication tools that it prefers? In that case, we adapt fluidly to your preferred systems. Unlike other companies that force you to conform to their ecosystem, we have the background necessary to work with most platforms.

For example, many of our clients like to use Jira for backlog and task management, Slack for communication, and Webex for calls. We can adapt to these systems and countless more. 

Knowing which tools to leverage is crucial to delivering next-level digital capabilities. For example, a multinational brewing company wanted to have full visibility of its truck fleets. We utilized IoT devices, the Azure cloud, Azure Stream, and Power BI to build a real-time fleet management system that gave them 100% visibility on each of their vehicles.

Coaching 

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of agile development. Teams can get so focused on an individual task that they forget to take a step back and evaluate the big picture, making it easy to fall back into suboptimal habits. 

That’s why we offer our clients an agile coaching session every two weeks. These sessions typically last 1-2 hours and are an opportunity to review KPIs and reevaluate the effectiveness of your processes.

Many of our competitors do not include coaching sessions in their offerings. Instead, they focus on how they can augment your staff and fill skill gaps to enable development. While filling skill gaps is important, it is only the first step towards building robust and sustainable agile development processes.  

Metrics 

Few tech consulting companies are transparent about how they track the effectiveness of agile development. However, your company cannot afford to invest time and money into agile on a hunch. You need clear metrics tracking the effectiveness, predictability, and quality of agile sprints. 

Our Agile Experience process collects this important data and makes it available to you early and often. We measure the predictability of agile sprints with a multitude of metrics, including cycle time (average time between beginning and ending work on an item) and throughput (number of items completed during a sprint). 

There are also plenty of metrics detailing agile effectiveness. That includes attainment, which is the percentage of items deployed and approved by the product owner compared to pre-sprint expectations. Meanwhile, we measure quality with KPIs such as the number of bugs found in the production environment per release.  

That’s just the beginning of the metrics Programmers tracks for you during development. No two products are ever the same, which is why we also track additional data specifically related to the goals of your organization and this initiative. 

Final Thoughts 

There are a lot of technology consulting companies that your organization could partner with. In our hometown of Chicago alone, there are 211 different software development companies, according to Clutch. Choosing just one can be intimidating. 

At Programmers, we work hard to make that decision as simple as possible for companies like yours. We offer the most comprehensive agile development process on the market with our Agile Experience. As you’ve read in this guide, it combines the tools, teams, metrics, and coaching you’ll need to begin, maintain, and optimize agile development. 

We believe that each component of the Agile Experience works to move you towards value-driven development. Read more about the Agile Experience on our website and contact us when you’re ready to begin working together.

Let us know how we can help you.