Agile Product Development Methodology
At SPAN Technology Services, we follow Agile methodology for the software development process. The Agile development process begins with clients explaining the expected product and how it would solve problems. The customer's expectations are thus clarified to the product development team.
Requirements are broken down into stages, and the development team works towards continuous improvements and iterations at each stage. Each individual in the team is responsible for planning, designing, developing, executing, and testing the product. This further helps ensure that the product meets customer’s expectations.
The continuous collaboration among the product owners and the team members is important in each stage, and it will help in communicating the informed decisions on both sides.
Agile and Sprint
Sprint is the development method followed with a 2-week duration. During a sprint cycle, the development team completes a certain part of the functionality and achieves pre-established goals. Three consecutive sprint cycles form a Wave, and the feature is rolled-out to LIVE at the
end of the wave cycle.
Requirements Analysis
We gear up for new challenges at the initial phase of product development and spend maximum time understanding the business needs. We go through a cycle of detailed analysis of each product and build them from scratch.
We work towards an optimal business model that benefits our clients with a cost-effective, on-time, and quality output. The requirements will be gathered and verified from client's meetings, in-depth analysis of available documents, marketing feedback, competitors' products, etc.
Release Plans
Once we agree upon the client demands, we move on to gather information and start documenting them through our product backlog. Our plan for the upcoming milestone release will decide the requirements for the first phase of the development.
We discuss and present a product idea as a heads-up to the entire team. Mock-ups are created and shared across the entire team. We make sure the Agile spirit is followed while developing a mock-up for development. Business Analysts lead this exercise and make sure everyone gets the idea of what is being developed.
We document the requirements and come up with 'story points' to determine the efforts needed for developing each. The product backlog will have a high-level description of each requirement, priority, estimation, and release plan.
Design Sprint
We give utmost importance to user experience. We don't ever compromise on UI and UX. The essence of Agile is to respond to user queries, and our innate best practices have led to a flow of product development that enriches user experience.
We do follow the design Sprints that actually reduce the risks during the development. A team of experts would come up with the design ideas and a discussion will happen in-order to make justifications for the actual deliverables.
Our team works on both the low fidelity and high fidelity prototype for a clear understanding of the expected screens or results. In some cases, we also develop MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to see how it works.
The stakeholders could make better decisions on changes with this MVP. And we get feedback from the marketing team and sometimes from clients too. We analyze the feedback and accommodate changes as required before we go ahead with full-fledged development.
Development Sprint
We give each team member of the product development team clear targets and deadlines to meet. We ensure proper coding standards and naming conventions are being followed. Code reviews for performance and security checks are done. We conduct internal demos to ensure a stable build before sprint release. The sprint release would thus be ready for testing of all the intended functions.
Testing
Our Testing team takes care of the entire testing activity under Quality Assurance. Our experts test across all the product requirements through both automation and manual testing. The Quality Assurance team communicates the feedback to developers immediately to ensure the quality of the sprint deliverables.
Since we involve the testing team at the early stage of development, the test preparations start early and help achieve better test coverage. The testers do user acceptance testing at the end of every sprint. We ensure a transparent testing process throughout the entire product development.
Product Live
Once the product deliverable is tested and ready for live, we move the build from sprint to the staging server, simulating a live environment. Testing is done at the staging server to ensure the product meets our customer expectations. Product demo and review among the product owners and stakeholders happen. Once everyone is satisfied, the actual product will go live.
Product Marketing
The product marketing team takes the product to its actual end customer and helps position the product through its marketing strategies and efforts. Our marketing team ensures that the product is accessible and reaches our target customer.
At the initial stage of product development, our marketing team collects data from a different source that would help to prioritize the deliverables for development. We do extensive research on competitors to see actually know their business model and how they strategize their marketing efforts. This would help us to position our products among the competition and also helps derive the strategy to market the product.
We often have a strategy for each of the digital marketing channels and drive targeted traffic in all possible ways. We also strategize and work towards converting the traffics into qualified leads and active users that would benefit both the customer and the product owner.
Customer Support
We have a dedicated product support team to provide support services to our customers. The team is available 24x7 assisting customers through Phone, Chat, and Email support. We often build a dedicated knowledge base site that would help customers to know the INs and out when our support people are offline.
Customer satisfaction is an end goal for any product. So, we get feedback from our customers, prioritize tasks, accommodate them in the upcoming sprints, and the process continues.