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Agile Development Management

Evoke has great expertise and a successful track record of assisting various medium and enterprise clients in implementing the Agile process. The method emphasizes working software as the primary measure of progress. A new working release of software may take from 1 to 4 weeks instead of months. The emphasis of Agile development is on obtaining the smallest workable piece of functionality to release a new software at the end of an iteration, hence delivering business value early. Through continuous planning and feedback, re-evaluation of project priorities is done at the end of every iteration for further improvement/addition of functionality throughout the life of the project.

However, for quick and efficient operation of Agile methods, it requires a highly collaborative approach. With rapid development schedule, Agile requires constant communication and interaction between business logic and development teams. The Agile’s fixed schedule and budget require flexibility in scope management. The methods are well applied when Evoke and clients understand and enforce the following grounds:

• The culture of the organization must be supportive for negotiation
• People must be trusted
• Team consists of few but more competent people
• Organizations need to have an environment that facilitates rapid communication between team members

Communication Practices

• We share guideline, policy, discussion and feedback on intranet content management system.
• We operate with multiple communication channels. Face to face meetings are always encouraged. For remote teams, we use the web conference meeting technologies including WebEx and video conference. The technologies allow us to share desktop, presentations, live drawings, and applications to make the process collaborative.
• Our wiki is the best possible way for sharing common information. Lots of information is available with a click of the Search button. In addition to the common wiki site, each team creates its own structure on the wiki.
• We facilitate onsite collaboration and send people to the sites of clients and partners for in-person discussion. Contact visits can help in building trust. These visits facilitates in generating and sustaining healthy professional relationships.
• We hold short war room meeting daily. It helps people review action items, discuss feedbacks and plan for the day.
• We separate team on the basis of functionality. This helps in optimum utilization of human resource based on competency and effective management of the teams.

Development Practices

• Our iterations are short: 1 to 2 weeks.
• We hold iteration planning meetings and conference. It helps in coordinating everyone in the team.
• We integrate features and components frequently. We do not wait until a component is complete for integration with other. We integrate a small number of methods along the development cycle.
• We monitor the features that are complete and present in the process. We verify passed and failed features by routine daily build and installation. We review future reference features and prioritize them frequently.
• We use mainline development model to allow developers continue with coding while QA perform the testing of the application.