5 Agile software development – ​​no progress without empiricism

[suchona.kani.z]

Understood agile, but unable to explain empirical evidence? We should change that. We have already learned a lot about agility within software development in the previous blog posts in this series. When we develop software in an agile way, we usually set up a hypothesis. The hypothesis usually includes an assumption about the needs of a customer and an idea of ​​how we can satisfy that need.

If we implement this hypothesis, we then review our result together with the customer. We also examine the path to the result and consider what we can keep in the process and what we can improve. We inspect what we have done and adapt our way of working to be even more successful in the next iteration.

What does empiricism mean?
I don't want to get too historical today, but since empiricism is not an everyday term for everyone, I would like to clarify this term first. "Empiricism" comes from Greek and means something like "experience" or "experiential knowledge". The Duden dictionary describes "empiricism" as: "knowledge gained from scientific experience".

Now, we are mostly not scientists. But simply put, it is primarily guatemala consumer email list​ about systematically collecting data in order to test and verify or refute a theory or hypothesis that has been put forward. This means that when it comes to empiricism, we do not just rely on theoretical science, but also gain our own experience.

Gaining experience is not enough, and just collecting data is not enough either. We want to be efficient in what we do. So how does empiricism work in practice?

Empirical Process Control
The empiricism is based on three pillars, all of which we can find in the principles of the agile manifesto, but also in various agile frameworks. With the help of empirical process control, we can apply empiricism and fully benefit from it.

The three pillars are: transparency, verification and adaptation.

Transparency
The more transparently we work - individually or as a team - the more data and information we have about what we do. But how do we create transparency? First and foremost through communication.