Making Agile and Design Thinking Collaborate for Software Development

With Agile methodology for software development, the battle of defining processes, structures, and plans for seamless product delivery has come to an end. Contrary to the traditional development models, Agile allowes organizations to respond faster to the functional, technical, and market changes.

Agile methodology for product development focuses on:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Since Agile aims at consumer-centric development, it’s a sought after methodology for building scalable software applications. However, Agile, in no way is enabling development team to make the products innovative, visualize the flaws, and find new ways to tackle with them. This is where Design Thinking comes in to add value to software product engineering.

Design thinking is an approach to problem solving in which inspiration, ideation, and implementation occur not in sequence but as a ‘system of overlapping spaces’. - Tim Brown

Agile and Design Thinking: When the Two Comes Together!

Agile methodology and design thinking are two powerful trends in software development industry that works parallely. The two when combined gives more power to a software application- right from ideation to development.  

While Agile focuses on ‘how to execute’, Design Thinking (DT) determines ‘what you should be building in first place’. DT uses a consumer-drive feedback loop (in theory) to validate new feature ideas as soon as possible and before the development commence.  

Let’s understand the role of Design Thinking approach in software product engineering through 6 phase DT cycle.

• Empathise (with the users): The product team consucts a research to develop an understanding of the users
  
  
• Define (the problem, user requirement): They combine all the research and observe where user’s problem exist
  
  
• Ideate (challenge assumptions and create ideas): Generate a rage of creative ideas to solve the problem
  
  
• Prototype (start creating solutions):Build real, tactile presentations for the ideas shortlisted for problem-solving
  

• Test (solutions): The product team and engineers put the problem resolving ideas in front of the users and ask for their feedback
  
  
• Implement: If it works, the engineers put the vision into effect

Design Thinking is a creative engine and Agile is the best approach to implement ideas into working reality, as soon as possible. Since Agile breaks up development into small parts, it is possible to validate the ideas, execute them, and rework on them, as the requirement arises, post consumer feedback.

Daffodil’s Design Thinking Approach: ‘The Discover & Frame Workshop’

Daffodil’s Discover & Frame workshop is the leanest approach to materialize your product idea. This program is orchestrated to ensure that we gather an in-depth understanding of your idea, target users, competitors, revenue model and most importantly, your expectations from Daffodil. Our business analysts consume this intel to provide you a no-nonsense plan that outlines the entire scope, user flow, timeline and cost of developing a market fit product.