When it comes to software development you have multiple methodologies to keep in mind, all of which are either simple or more complex depending on the situation. The challenge is that finding the right one can be very time-consuming and challenging. The idea is to know what you are getting into and actively focus on finding the best solutions based on your needs. Both Agile and Scrum seem to be some of the best options that you can find right now, but you have to wonder which one is the best for you.
What is Agile?
Agile is a practice that focuses on a continual iterative development and testing phase. What makes Agile unique is the fact that you get to break the product into smaller builds. Here you will notice that development goes hand in hand with testing. You also have more focus on face to face communication and teamwork. Everyone actually has to work together in order to create a particular product or software piece.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an Agile process. this one is focused on offering the best business value without spending a lot of time. it focuses on repeatedly and rapidly inspecting the working software with great results. It’s fully focused on accountability, iterative progress, teamwork and other features.
Scrum vs Agile differences
Agile is all about the incremental and iterative approach, Scrum delivers incremental builds with amazing results. In Agile the requirement remains the same. For Scrum everything changes very fast. And while Agile is all about leadership most of the time, Scrum focuses on having teams that organize themselves. Both of them require collaboration, Scrum has more focus on the daily stand up meetings.
The reason why a lot of people go with Scrum is because there’s no need to make frequent changes, something that’s at the core of Agile. However, Agile does provide frequent deliveries to the customer and that can be extremely helpful and suitable to offer good results.
In Agile, the execution and design are as simple as possible. But if you think about Scrum for example, you can be experimental and innovative here, which is what really matters the most in a situation like this. When you compare Scrum vs Agile, you will notice that the former doesn’t need to have working software as an elementary measure, but Agile certainly needs that, so it’s something to consider and keep in mind.
The main principles of Agile include allowing changes based on customer requirements, team attitude is adjusted based on behavior, there’s a lot of attention to technical excellence and everyone works together to complete the project. Scrum on the other hand is about self-organization, collaboration, time-boxing as well as iterative development. The processes do have similarities as you can see, but the ideology and ideas work quite nicely and everything can be adapted and adjusted to your own requirements all the time.
In Agile, the project head will handle everything and he will be the one that will tell people what to do, what tasks to perform and what needs to be adapted and adjusted this time. Scrum doesn’t rely on teams at all, and that can be a huge problem for the most part. That’s why you always need to adapt this process adequately as it will provide you with some great results every time if you handle it right.
Agile is quite flexible and it requires room to change most of the time. Scrum is quite rigid so you don’t really have room for a lot of changes. You can still make some changes here and there, but those are not as comprehensive and that is obviously going to bring in some of its own challenges.
Which is the best?
That’s hard to say because it all comes down on the situation and project. If you want to have the team under control of most things, then Scrum works great since it delivers the highest business value. Agile is all about iterative development and the challenge with it is that it reacts to changes while also being very flexible. Even if Scrum is indeed based on Agile, the fact that it’s mostly about giving more business value is seen from the start but it does adapt quite nicely for the most part.