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Agile Software Development Services

Discover the fastest way to build high-quality, complex applications

By combining agile methodology with our rapid development platform, we build high-quality enterprise software in record time using principles from the agile manifesto. Get on-shore development from a UK team with 30+ years’ experience.

Talk to a leading agile software development company

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Introduction to agile

Why is Agile the industry standard for software development?

Agile is a software development framework designed to make the process of creating software fast, efficient, and collaborative.

It was created as an alternative to ‘waterfall’ development, which involves building the different parts of the app in a linear process. Instead, agile focuses on building a full (but basic) working version of the app, then improving it in iterations.

Agile Development Methodology Benefits

The agile development methodology has several unique benefits:

Get working software faster

Instead of potentially waiting years to see a working version of your app, you could get an early version in months.

Integrate feedback earlier

Because agile development produces working software faster, it’s easier to evaluate its progress and get feedback from stakeholders.

Use budget efficiently

Agile helps you avoid building irrelevant features so you don’t waste any of your development budget, promoting a more efficient development life cycle.

Benefits of agile

Why choose agile over other development frameworks?

1. Accelerates development lifecycle and delivery

Agile focuses on building all parts of the software at the same time, rather than in separate stages. This enables developers to create a working version of the app and get feedback earlier on in the process.

2. Optimises resources

Because agile methodology involves getting feedback from your stakeholders frequently, developers can make adjustments to the project quickly. This allows the developers to avoid wasting effort on features that don’t align with your goals. In addition, because agile promotes collaboration, the developers can contribute their expertise where it’s most useful.

3. Empowers better collaboration

Agile supports ‘cross-functional’ development teams, where the agile software engineers have different strengths and specialities. This helps to ensure that all project teams consider all necessary perspectives and allows the team to tackle complex challenges intelligently.

4. Provides constant feedback

Agile projects are typically broken down into small ‘sprints’, and at the end of each sprint, the development team will usually have a new iteration of the application ready. This allows stakeholders (and potentially users) the chance to provide feedback on a regular basis.

5. Adapts to market change

Agile allows the development team to produce fast, frequent iterations and releases. This enables the company building the software to easily react to customer changes, market trends, and new technologies, maintaining agility throughout the development life cycle.

6. Future-proofs your software

Because agile development teams regularly incorporate feedback, they avoid creating products with outdated or irrelevant features. What’s more, agile helps developers prioritise features according to what users really need. This ultimately means that developers create software that remains competitive in the marketplace.

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Challenges of agile development

Is Agile the right methodology for enterprise software?

Enterprise software is usually complex, integrating multiple layers of data and sophisticated interdependencies. For this reason, companies experience numerous challenges when taking an agile approach to enterprise software development:

Off-shore software partners struggle to implement agile

Agile processes are highly collaborative, but if you’re hiring off-shore teams, they won’t work closely with you. Instead, they’ll typically follow briefs you send them. Off-shore teams often end up ‘converting’ the project to a waterfall format, meaning you lose the benefits offered by agile.

Working from wireframes and prototypes isn’t practical

UX agencies will often create prototypes and use these as the starting point for their work. Applying this process to software development can work well for simple apps and smaller companies. However, it doesn’t work well for enterprise software due to the complex interdependencies involved.

Rising IT complexity makes it harder to use agile methodologies

Enterprises often have to harness huge amounts of secure data. New technologies are emerging all the time, and enterprises will need to integrate their data with them in order to provide modern services.

What’s more, enterprises are typically part of a wider ecosystem of partners, vendors, who will also have increasingly complex technology needs. All of these complicated requirements mean that the agile approach of making small but frequent changes becomes more difficult.

Agile development for enterprise

We’ve adapted Agile for enterprise software to accelerate development while improving code quality

Rapid development platform

We’ve built our own development technology that allows us to automate and accelerate coding. This allows us to speed up development, deliver superior quality code, and keep our teams small.

Small, cross-functional team

Larger teams arguably mean there’s more that can go wrong. With Griffiths Waite, you get an experienced in-house team that knows how to apply agile methodologies to enterprise development. What’s more, our agile software development team will be around to offer support for years to come.

In-person collaboration

Because we only use in-house, on-shore developers, we can work with you face-to-face in the UK and incorporate your input into our coding. We’re conveniently based in Birmingham, in the UK’s midlands.

Open-source frameworks

By using open-source libraries like React.js to build your application, we can use existing components as a starting point for our code. This helps accelerate project timelines without increasing development costs.

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Agile development services

What types of Agile software do we create?

As one of the UK’s leading enterprise software developers, we can custom-build software solutions such as:

Internal and back-office systems
Customer portals
Digital solutions
Analytics and AI
Chat-bots
Mobile apps

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Our agile development process

How we develop enterprise software with Agile

At Griffiths Waite, our approach focuses on developing the software around your business goals and user needs. We’ve refined this process over 30 years to bring you the best agile software development services.

Identify the product landscape

For a development project to be successful, it needs to start with a full analysis of what the company needs from the end product. So, in this phase, we’ll work with you to answer questions like:

What are the business’s objectives?
How will the software support them?
How will we measure success?

Create the product vision and architecture

Because enterprise systems are highly complex, they require upfront planning that considers data needs, security and compliance requirements, integrations and more.

Accordingly, we take time to blueprint and model how the overall architecture of the software will look, ensuring incremental improvements. Even though we will move into typical agile ‘sprints’ later, having this overall blueprint keeps everyone on the same page during development.

Complete the product design and development

Complex enterprise solutions usually require at least twelve months, with some projects taking years. We break this down into three-month phases, and each of these phases is broken down further into sprints.

Each development sprint is usually around two weeks, with each sprint creating a new version of the software that your team can provide feedback on.

Provide Support after the software goes live

If your project is an update or replacement of an existing system, we can help you roll out deployment in phases to avoid any disruption to your daily operations. And because all of our team is in-house, the same developers will be able to provide you with support throughout the software development lifecycle.

Why choose Griffiths Waite for agile development?

Get an enterprise application with superior code in record time

Griffiths Waite is one of the UK’s leading agile development providers. We help enterprises get a unique competitive edge via our specialities:

Development innovations

Our service includes access to innovations that you won’t find anywhere else. Our rapid react development platform incorporates a done-for-you design system and UI integration layer that lets you integrate new and old application components.

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Accelerated delivery

We develop your application with the help of our own JavaScript automation framework. It allows us to replicate and modify your existing business rules without manual coding, for accelerated delivery with superior quality code.

Disruption-free implementation

If you’re replacing an older system, changing all your screens in one go is risky. Our UI integration layer lets you switch between old and new systems so you can replace screens in phases—without disrupting your work.

Experienced UK team

With 30+ years in development and 10+ years’ experience in React.js, we’re a leading UK agile consultant. Our team is fully in-house and is here to support you long-term.

Case studies

See how our agile development services transform organisations

Read our case studies to see examples of our agile development projects, or read our blog for more insights.

Arqiva

Griffiths Waite delivers Arqiva’s global customer portal in 90 days

Arqiva needed to deliver a global customer portal (across desktop, tablet and mobile) that had been promised for 10 years.

To meet the aggressive timescale we took full responsibility for the entire product development, working in fortnightly design and development sprints to deliver a working MVP in 3 months.

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Atradius — Atrium

Griffiths Waite transforms Atradius’ online offering to improve its global positioning

Atradius wanted to improve its online customer systems but was held back by an outdated design and legacy technology.

Redesigning the user experience to put the customer first, we built a new full-stack JavaScript application in React, Node.js and TypeScript, delighting Atradius’ users worldwide.

FAQ

How does scrum methodology help in agile software development?

Scrum is a sub-set of agile—a set of concrete practices and roles that helps developers apply that Agile framework. It offers a structured methodology for implementing the principles of Agile in a systematic way.

Many agile teams include roles set out by Scrum, such as Scrum Master and Product Owner. Teams following Scrum will typically work in sprints and hold daily ‘scrum meetings’ to assess plans and progress.

What are the challenges of agile software development?

While agile is advantageous to both development teams and the companies hiring them, it also presents several key challenges:

Remote collaboration issues. Agile is meant to involve collaboration, so may be less effective when teams and stakeholders are all working remotely.
Technical debt. Large organisations often have older systems that are slowly developing issues and incompatibilities over time. This can make it difficult to adopt agile processes, as the systems themselves can slow down the development process.
Resistance to change. Organisations moving to agile may be reluctant to adopt new working practices.
Scope creep. Because agile aims to be flexible and incorporate feedback, it can lead to stakeholders requesting changes that were not part of the original project scope.