Agile Cost Savings: 11 Ways to Save

Last Updated on 2024-10-11

Have you thought about going Agile and how it impacts your business? How Agile can save you stacks of money? And why Agile is the way to go? As entrepreneurs, we always strive to make informed and proactive decisions for our business. With this, let’s talk about how you can have cost savings with Agile.

What is Agile Development?

Many people mistake Agile as a platform. However, Agile is a set of software development principles and discipline. The methods executed are incremental and in iteration.

With Agile, requirements and solutions drive the collaboration of cross-functional teams. This means that the practices of Agile involve interaction between a different set of teams and/or individuals to achieve a software product at a definite time before proceeding to another iteration.

How to Realize Agile Cost Savings

Agile has been proven to be an effective software development practice. It can already provide advantages to collaborative efforts and improved dynamics. Aside from its quality, schedule, and scope optimization, one of its characteristics is to save on cost. Here are things that explain how Agile can save you money:

1. Simple and enough

Besides the fast and rapid development dynamics, Agile is simple. It allows for doing the simplest things to get results. Simple things include unit tests, sprint planning, and defining an MVP. You don’t have to overdo everything. Just develop what’s needed.

2. Eliminates waste and increases business value

By developing only what’s needed, you can avoid waste of time and waste on unnecessary costs. This shortens the time and allows businesses to get more revenue.

3. Ensures quality throughout

Because Agile sets focus on deliverables, the quality of the software product is ensured by the end of the iteration. Agile encourages completing compartmentalized batches of work (Sprint backlogs) to emphasize features and functionalities.

4. Strengthens commitment

From the little batches of work, commitment span for each individual or team becomes more manageable compared to the longer needs for other methods such as Waterfall. Developers don’t find many issues with committing to work for shorter periods of time.

5. Fast

The frequency of delivery for Agile is rapid and iterative. Therefore, what’s needed to be developed is what’s required for the time being. Other features that are not high-priority can be carried over as the development increments.

6. Allows collaboration

Having an Agile team optimizes collaboration throughout teams and individuals in an organization. Information transparency and speed in communication allows for faster product delivery. Communication is real-time and it is much easier to collaborate with ideas and mandates.

7. Minimizes uncertainty

Since Agile exists on narrower time frames, uncertainties are minimized. Unlike Waterfall, uncertainties are much more likely to disrupt the development process because forecasting is far more challenging.

8. Improves team morale

Just the entire collaborative and dynamic development process allow developers to enrich their creativity. The relationship boundaries are nonexistent allowing communication and positive culture to thrive in the team.

9. Reduces room for failure

With more gauge on possible risks and uncertainties, the team reduces failure by implementing preventive measures for these challenges. When you avoid failures, it saves you from wasting all the resource investment that you spent, thus minimizing the cost. 

10. Always welcomes change 

This one may raise some eyebrows because changes can be very time-consuming. However, welcoming change also helps you un-commit to things that may no longer be relevant by the end of the development period. 

For example, you’re developing a live chat box for users of your website who need customer support. However, chatbots have populated the trend for customer support. Now, you have an option to scrap the live chat box and replace it with a chatbot. Same advanced feature is done in a shorter amount of time!

11. Can be offshored

Just like any other software project, it can be offshored whatever the development process is. How is this relevant? Offshoring offers the best cost-effective advantages due to a huge difference in the economy. This is the best way to make your Agile project save you tons of cash.

How to offshore Agile Scrum teams?

How can something as cost-effective as offshoring be trustworthy? Simple.

You look for offshoring companies that host a pool of the best resources in their locality. Most companies where you can offshore are also startups so filtering out those tested with time can become a challenge.

Lucky for you, Full Scale is here! Full Scale has developers who are experienced in software development with different setups. This experience equips them to become members of your Agile offshore team!

Visit our website now or message us and let’s talk about minimizing your costs with the best resources.

For further discussion, let’s get to know the principles of Agile that make it favorable for tech startup businesses.

Principles of Agile

As mentioned, Agile development revolves around the concept of iterative development. Additionally, it is also incremental. With these concepts, some principles are followed to keep track of the resources and manage the activities in software development. Here are the principles of agile development:

• Adaptable to changing of requirements at any point in the development
• Early customer satisfaction through continuous delivery
• Frequent product delivery
• A streamlined communication channel between developers and business owners
• Maintainable development pace across teams and individuals
• Constant improvement through retrospective sessions
• Focus on the essential values of the product
• Regular adaptation to change

What is Scrum?

Now, another term usually associated with Agile is Scrum. Scrum is a subset of Agile and one of its most popular ones. Scrum is a process framework for agile software development. Its framework consists of a set of practices that must be executed to consistently follow the order of the framework. These practices are contained within defined time frames an element of Scrum called Sprints.

The relevance of Scrum in this topic is its popularity among many software businesses adapting to the practice. Why so? The Scrum process benefits businesses and organizations in the following ways:

• Increases the quality of the deliverables through focus on processes
• Manages changes better compared to other SDLCs
• Illustrate highly accurate estimates on tasks
• Provides more control over project schedule and state
• Helps manage risks easily
• Maintains the quality of the software product
• Allows control and even saves a lot on costs

Let’s build your tech startup business with Agile!

At Full Scale, we have teams of software developers, managers, and testers to build the product of your dreams! Hiring doesn’t have to be expensive. We will take care of everything you need. We can assist you with agile cost savings.

All you have to do is give us that call or explore our website to know us even more!