Agile methods have become a norm for digital technology ventures.
Speed and quality are two key focus points in IoT (Internet of Things) solutions in many technology ventures. According to the conventional view, speed and quality are the competing aspects of product development.
According to this view, the faster a product is developed, the less quality it may have. However, nowadays, speed is as important as quality. Consumers want products and services quickly; hence the businesses are under tremendous pressure to serve their customers due to these ever-growing demands.
The IoT solutions are usually created with utmost urgency due to their nature and the high expectations from the stakeholders and consumers.
The product or service owners are under constant pressure to take their products and services to the market to stay competitive on the market. Consequently, this puts a lot of pressure on the IoT solution architects and designers too.
Consumers expectation for faster delivery for IoT devices is a fact. This trend is increasing hence putting the manufacturers and solution providers under pressure. Furthermore, it is essential to consider that IoT devices require frequent updates for their software components, including firmware (microcode). This requirement is a result of increasing security concerns for IoT. As the security literature depicts, the intelligence level of the hackers is rising gradually.
Because of these speedy trends in the industry and the focus on addressing consumer demands, there is an ongoing need to deploy agile methods to create IoT solutions. Hence, agile approaches have become the norm in technology ventures, especially for creating IoT solutions and an IoT ecosystem in large business organizations.
Agile methods have also become popular in manufacturing. In fact, there is a practice called “Agile Manufacturing” with tools and processes of the agile approach designed for manufacturing. The aim of this practice is rapidly responding to customers, the market, and business innovations.
IoT solution architects and designers must take part in this agile approach for developing IoT business solutions. They are expected to make quick architectural and design decisions and develop fast solution designs to meet the demands of the business organizations.
This means that they have little time to analyze and make decisions during the macro design level. This time constraint leaves no or minimal margin for mistakes.
Therefore, these architects and designers need to know the security, availability, performance, and project cost implications by heart.
In this case, to produce solutions in agility, substantial experience, and deep knowledge matter for the IoT solution architects and designers. The aim here is to highlight the importance of agility and prepare the IoT solution architects and designers to effectively meet the demands of business stakeholders and consumers.
In order to meet the agility requirements of programs, before starting an IoT solution, architects and designers should ask three critical questions.
- How can we speed up developing this IoT solution?
- How can we make hardware, software, and combinations ready to market and serve the clients in agility?
- And how can we maintain operational quality while using agility?
The quick answer to these questions is to follow an established agile solution method. Using agile methods is the new norm and the reality in IoT manufacturers, developers, and service providers.
The project management discipline adapted agile methods very quickly. As a result, it is pervasive to see multiple agile projects in many business organizations.
Agile affected the technical professional too. Therefore, IoT solution architects and designers need to know about agile solution development and develop their solutions using this modern approach.
Many business organizations provide education programs on agile before starting their mission-critical solutions. Therefore, learning agile methods beforehand is valuable for practitioners, and the business for program success. And of course, it is essential for customer satisfaction.
At a high level, some of the key concepts in an agile project are creating Epics, writing User Stories, putting Stories to the Backlog, creating solution artifacts, and completing the Sprint successfully by producing Acceptance Criteria.
I plan to introduce these five key concepts of the agile methods: Epics, User Stories, Backlogs, Sprints, and Acceptance Criteria in my upcoming articles within the IoT solution framework.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
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