Application Development
Snowbird Agility is passionate about quickly and efficiently building quality software to meet user needs. We do this by leveraging a Lean-Agile Mindset, eXtreme Programming (XP) techniques, and Human-Centered Design (HCD) practices.
Uncertain requirements, demanding delivery targets, and poor quality are among many of the impediments that teams can face. For some, this spurns a desire to control as many factors as possible. Unfortunately, this approach often creates its own risks – lengthy delivery times, budget overruns, and missing customer expectations can be the result.
The Agile Manifesto, XP, and HCD all place humans in the center of their focus. XP includes a holistic quality focus, collaborative coding techniques, and incremental development. Agile looks for efficiencies by focusing the teams on what matters most – pleasing the customer. HCD seeks to understand the needs, motivations, and behaviors of the target audience so that teams can create products that solve real problems and meet real needs.
Snowbird Agility leads teams to embody a different way of building applications — one that actually reduces or eliminates program risks while at the same time delighting customers. We do this by working through uncertainties, rather than being blocked by them. Instead of fighting change, we embrace it as a path to building even better, more valuable systems than what could have been imagined previously. We understand high quality is built into products throughout the engineering process and cannot be attained with only after-the-fact testing. For end-user applications we apply human-centered design to drive system requirements, rather than the other way around. And most importantly, we reduce delivery risk through early and continuous plan-build-test cycles with short timeframes that incrementally deliver high-quality value to the customer.
Snowbird Agility also addresses the common misunderstanding that introducing Agile or XP means that teams will need to work harder and faster. Indeed, teams that embrace these techniques do produce valuable, high-quality products faster, but this is achieved by:
- Working smarter, not harder
- Constantly evaluating priorities and delivering the highest-value features first
- Eliminating waste and toil
- Transparently communicating across the team, customers and stakeholders
- Building-in quality throughout the engineering process
- Continuously updating skills
- Empowering decision making at the level where the knowledge lives
- Inspiring and motivating by communicating a shared vision for the future
By working under these principles, teams produce outcomes that consistently meet, and often exceed expectations. Snowbird Agility has led teams to this level of achievement many times. Click the box on the right to start a conversation about how we can lead your Application Development teams to new heights!