We love thinking that we are better than we actually are. We strive for perfection, trying to reach it by any means necessary. We work ourselves to the ground trying to reach perfection, and often fail along the way.

Software development is a long and brutal process, requiring a lot of attention to detail and following protocol in order for us to actually build functional and desirable software. Sometimes, the end users don’t like what they get and that can be problematic, because core features would need to be changed, which presents the developers with issues that can’t easily be solved.

This is where agile software development comes in handy, or at least, we think that it does. Here is what you should know about agile software development.

Agile – Developing While Always Communicating with the End User

The end user will eventually be the one who will be using the piece of software we are working on. This is good, but can present us with a problem if we completely miss the cue and end up with a program that doesn’t work or does its job poorly. The users might simply not like parts of the program and wish that it was different.

Developers came up with the idea of agile software development, a way to develop software while at the same time, always communicating with the client or end user, always in touch and relaying information, to help build the best piece of software possible.

It Sounds Great

Agile software development is basically a process where the client or user is involved all the time, testing and talking about various features and parts of the software that the developers intended to implement, and that the user will eventually use.

Users can point out some flaws that might be bad in the end, and since it is a collaborative matter, the developers might fix the problem without making the source code overly complicated or slow. This type of software development is praised as being the best there is, that it speeds up the process and that it makes everything better. Yet, it is far from the most applied type of software development process.

But the Truth Says Otherwise

Hard data says that agile software development isn’t as effective as people would like to believe and we can imagine the process going bad from too many ideas that clients might have. Unlike graphic design, software development isn’t really that prone to change whenever a client or user wishes that a change would happen.

Software development is hard and it takes a lot of time and effort and for the most part, users should not be involved until alpha and beta tests are ready. Software developers are users themselves and they should know what good software looks like, feature-wise and optimization-wise.

Agile software development is a collaborative process between developers and users, where users give feedback while the process of development is underway, striving to build the perfect piece of software.