5th June 2015

Agile has been around for a while as an approach to software development and, at CDL, it's a way of working that has delivered real benefits when it's done well. As CDL continues to expand, becoming ever more agile ensures that the recruitment of extra people translates quickly into more value delivered to customers. Through a commitment to agile thinking and autonomous team structures, CDL is empowering its people to continuously improve the way we make and deliver great software.

The manifesto for agile software development emerged in 2001 as an alternative to rigid, process-driven approaches to software development. It contains four key ideas that sum up a different approach to producing software, and one which its 17 authors believed ultimately enables greater software to be created faster.

Being agile is defined as prioritising individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan.

Although the second categories are still relevant, the agile manifesto is based on the belief that a clear focus on the priorities in bold enables a different kind of culture and values from that which traditionally dominates software houses.

According to the principles of agile software development, reorganising people into smaller, multi-disciplinary groups and allowing them the freedom and resources to exercise a more innovative approach at work, leads to intuitive, better software.

Agile is a highly people-centric approach to developing software, which brings individuals together and prioritises collaborative, self-directed methods of working. In order to achieve this at CDL, people in the development teams work in 'squads': small, self-contained units of around eight to ten people taken from across our development landscape. Each squad has its own Developer, Testing, Analysis and Product Owner disciplines and function autonomously, much like a mini start-up.

Individual squads have domain expertise and are responsible for carrying out as much of the work in their area as possible, including business functionality and problem solving, as well as architectural and deployment changes.

There are 12 agile principles but for CDL, the key one is 'satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software'. Teams are encouraged to break work up into the smallest marketable feature set and release small but frequent updates that deliver value to customers. This helps create a constant feedback loop from software users that can ultimately guide the development road map and is far more rewarding than locking the value away for months in long major release cycles.

As the agile manifesto is about culture and values rather than a prescriptive way of working, different agile methodologies have emerged over the years. In keeping with agile principles, each CDL squad is free to adapt methodologies to suit the people working in it. The priority at all times is on delivering the best value to customers rather then sticking to rigid methods of working.

By focusing on people, giving them the environment, resources and freedom to develop great software, CDL enables people to achieve their potential and get better results for customers.

Creating software is about discovery. By embedding an agile culture, CDL empowers greater flexibility, creativity and collaboration among the people working there, leading to the production of more powerful, more elegant software � which is delivered to customers in ever shorter lead times.