Agile Methodologies and PaaS: A Priceless Combination?

Agile methodologies – both for software development and project management, are fairly new philosophies. Agile methodologies take the interactive and iterative approach to gather requirements from the customer for software development and (software) project management. Its aim is to provide flexibility to the developers, managers and the end user in order to arrive at the optimal (software) solution for the customer. In an era where time-to-market and adding value to the business to outsmart the competition have taken the center stage, agile development methodologies and PaaS make a priceless combination.

How does ‘PaaS’ add value to the Agile?

As a branch of cloud computing, PaaS is nothing but Platform-as-a-Service. It is available as a utility service for developing software applications where developers do not have to bother about installing the OS, storage capacities or hosting capabilities. The users of PaaS have to bother only about the pay per usage cost which is, as with other cloud computing branches, very small as compared to having the conventional on-premise IT setup. The PaaS service provider provides the entire setup required to develop a software application – the OS, the upgrades, the hosting capabilities and the network & data security.

PaaS offers developers certain pre-set configured components which can be customized (or edited) to suit the requirements of the customer. The developers do not have to build the entire software application from a scratch. It simply saves time and helps the organizations to deliver the solutions faster.

With PaaS, developers and project managers can take the iterative approach where the requirements can be gathered based on stages of development. The solutions can be delivered as a prototype with the available set of data and then the iterations can be taken from there to arrive at the best solution. This is very much feasible with PaaS with its ready to use pre-configured components. As a natural outcome, PaaS reinforces the agile development and management methodologies, which the organizations strive to adopt, in order to improve the customer responsiveness and reduce the time-to-deliver the solutions to the stakeholders. In other words, it is best to call PaaS as ‘agile ready’ framework and the new age method to go for development activities.

It also stands out vividly that PaaS explicitly promotes the collaborative approach (which has its own benefits when combined with agile methodologies and cloud computing) to development projects. It requires the stakeholders to collaborate, understand and convey their growing needs to the developers and the project manager so as to get the best-fit business solutions for which they are spending money.

Agile with PaaS is especially ideal for those situations where the uncertainty prevails high and the customer is not sure of his needs entirely or the project is too large to be documented in totality at one go. In such a situation, if the service providers make use of PaaS, then they can customize and incorporate changes in the coding faster as they do not have to start from the scratch.

Why is it especially a Boon for the SMBs?

SMBs typically need fast turnaround of results. Since they are small and need to out beat the larger players, they need double-edged sword to thwart the rising operational costs and ever increasing competition in the market. They also need to tame the market changes and integrate them within the framework of their services swiftly. The solution to all these problems can be found by adopting agile methodologies along with the PaaS and other realms of the cloud computing domain.

With little technical knowledge, applications can be developed rather quickly through PaaS and agile methodologies. The combination of these two approaches also helps to keep the operational costs low for the SMBs. The iterative approach of the agile methodologies and the pre-set configured component structures in PaaS can lead to development projects where all the important stakeholders are involved at all the critical stages and the best-fit solution is delivered to the customer after the least possible duration.

Agile with PaaS should ideally form a part of the entire business strategy for the SMBs. Adopting agile methodologies and PaaS as the corporate strategy not only facilitate to improve customer responsiveness, but these also overlay efficiencies for the internal operations for SMBs. Applications can be developed for inter-departmental use for automating the processes and reducing the chances of human errors. Automating the processes will facilitate information & data management. This in turn will definitely improve the operational efficiency within the SMBs. And the best part is that all this can be achieved at a fairly lower cost due to the inherent benefits of PaaS as a channel to cloud computing.