What is Agile ?

Agile is a software development methodology with a focus on multiple short-term development life cycles. With shorter development life cycles it prioritises the feedback that we receive from consumers and lets us make changes on the product faster. What makes Agile much efficient over its counterparts is that, it has a much smaller life cycle making the products much easier to test, achieve quicker feedback, and capture the market early.

Benefits of Agile

Better transparency	The more consistent we are with releasing new and quality products, the more will be the trust laid on us by consumers or clients on what to expect.
Predicts cost and schedules tasks	Agile achieves this as it has smaller life cycles, and the long-duration projects might involve unforeseen variables that can affect the budget and the time of project completion.
Allows for change	Agile makes the products more adaptable to future revisions as per market requirements.
Improves quality	Faster feedback loops put us in the track of consistent improvement, hence producing quality products.

Agile Software Development

Agile involves an incremental approach like the Waterfall model but with an iterative perspective, along with focusing on customer feedback, incorporating small rapid changes, and speeding up releases. It basically breaks the product into smaller divisions and finally integrates them for the testing process.

Advantages

The Agile methodology considers customer feedback throughout the project, which gives enough time to the team for making decisions. It welcomes making changes but at great expense. It has the ability to scale. There is continuous attention to technical excellence and good designs. This method prioritizes and schedules the most valuable features for implementation, decreasing the risk of having unusable resources.

Small and dedicated teams are involved with a high degree of involvement and coordination.

Disadvantages

There is less predictability in Agile. It requires more time and commitment from every stakeholder. Testers, developers, and customers must interact with each other constantly and should agree to each other’s decisions in order to get the task done, and hence Agile is time-consuming. Limited documentation often comes as a problem. In the case of fallbacks, there are very less detailed documents so as to cross-check.

The Agile model requires minimal planning at the beginning that makes it easier to develop the project quickly, but there is never a finite end. Due to unexpected functionalities, a clear vision of the project is not available, and mostly the stakeholders are not sure of what their final product would look like.