It’s no secret that the traditional waterfall development approach has many challenges, especially adjusting to changes. This approach involves your team following a predefined sequence of stages. Also, the team cannot move forward until the previous step is completed, which leaves no room for accommodating unexpected revisions or changes. However, in the currently highly disrupted business environment, companies must adopt development methods that accommodate changes quickly, hence, the term agile development.
Recognizing the need for speed and agility in modern businesses, Mendix has integrated the agile development framework to facilitate team collaboration throughout the development lifecycle. Mendix eases the transition to agile development as a leading low-code development platform. It offers the platform, tools, and processes to help you deliver apps at scale and speed. Let’s dive deeper into Mendix and agile development and how this low-code platform supports agile practices and collaboration tools. But before that, let’s start with the basics.
What is Agile Development?
Unlike the traditional waterfall method, the agile development approach is a framework that integrates aspects of continuous planning, integration, and testing, among other elements of continuous development. This development framework keeps minimal practices and rules compared to traditional development methods. For instance, you don’t need to follow a bureaucratic process to implement a change.
Agile is a responsive and iterative development framework where teams create apps in small increments instead of delivering the completed product at the end of the app development lifecycle. As a result, it supports frequent testing and allows stakeholders, end users, and the enterprise to provide feedback regarding the work in progress. Therefore, with this development framework, your team stays responsive and flexible to change.
Moreover, agile development is crucial because user needs and business requirements often evolve during development.
Features of Agile Development Framework
Some typical features of this development framework include the following:
- Adaptive planning
- High levels of collaboration and communication
- Continuous improvement
- Fast and efficient response to change
Core Values of Agile Development
The agile development framework is governed by 4 core values, including:
- Interactions and individual over tools and processes
- Adapting to change over sticking to a plan
- Functioning software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over negotiating contract
Transitioning to Agile Low-Code Development with Mendix
The Mendix low-code development platform is inherently agile and aligns with the core principles outlined in the agile manifesto. This low-code solution encourages collaboration between IT and business for accelerated, high-quality application development. It enables you to stay responsive to the changing user demands and needs, as it adopts low-code and agile development best practices.
But how do you transition to agile low-code development with Mendix? Here are 3 ways to do it:
Step-by-Step Approach
You cannot migrate to agile development overnight, especially if you rely on legacy systems. With Mendix low-code, you can start with a low-risk project to assess the process. Since it adopts a low-code development approach, Mendix makes deploying and testing changes easy without affecting your entire legacy system.
Hybrid Approach
This approach to transition to agile development involves adopting agile and waterfall practices in a way that makes the most sense for your company. For instance, you can use the waterfall approach for design and planning and agile for developing and testing an application in short sprints.
Full Transition
When ready to adopt agile development across the entire business, Mendix offers the flexibility and scalability to help your transition seamlessly. You will have the foundation to successfully adopt an agile framework upon implementing a hybrid or step-by-step approach.
How Mendix Supports Team Collaboration and Agile Development
Mendix offers multiple collaboration channels to help you build enterprise-grade applications faster, collaboratively, and more efficiently. Since collaboration is part of the agile development framework, Mendix is essentially agile. Here are some pre-built digital collaboration tools that help your cross-functional teams design, manage, and co-develop apps that the specified business needs:
1. Epics
Epics is a lightweight, easy-to-use agile project management tool that lets you update user stories in real time. This collaboration tool helps you track the parts of the app being worked on. Also, it delivers a handy progress check, enabling you to visualize how much work has been done. Once a linked story is completed, its progress is automatically marked as complete. This ensures every team member is on the same page.
2. Feedback Management
Mendix provides a robust feedback management tool that helps you capture new ideas to improve your application through polls. The Mendix feedback widget empowers your end users to provide feedback from the application’s context. This helps you continuously improve your application’s quality through passive and active feedback.
3. Buzz
Found in the Mendix developer portal, Buzz lets you visualize your application’s activity with your organization. Also, you can use it to share ideas and collaborate with your team. The easiest and fastest way to communicate with others on the buzz is by leaving comments
There are two kinds of buzz pages:
- App buzz and
- Company buzz
App buzz is designed for a specific application. It lets you visualize the size of your team, view the latest stories and feedback created for the application
On the other hand, company buzz shows buzz activity for all the applications for which you’re a member and all buzz activity for your organization. Its menu lets you choose whether you want to see buzz activity for a specific application or the company.
4. Version Control
Managing application versions and releases is an essential practice that enables you to reconcile several teams’ work in a single, unified revision. Mendix provides a centralized version control system (Mendix Team Server) based on Git. Each project developed using the Mendix platform has a Team Server version control repository. This system utilizes Git technology by default, allowing several developers to work on the same project.
Also, your developers can continuously combine model changes into revisions. These revisions are held in the Team Server, encouraging seamless collaboration.
Final Thoughts
Mendix is not only collaborative but also promotes the concepts of agile development. For instance, it provides user roles, like Scrum Master, Product Owner, End User, and Business Engineer, all based on agile practices. You can modify these roles to suit your company management requirements. What’s more, Mendix features collaborative tools like buzz, a version control system, and a feedback management system, enabling you to build apps collaboratively, faster, and more efficiently. Interested in building apps in a collaborative environment, adhering to agile best practices? Try Mendix today!
