The enhanced adoption of Cloud, Big Data, Mobility is causing more services to be developed and aggregated, hence there is a greater emphasis on Agile for service aggregation. Agile processes have specific methods to manage the rapid development cycles and changing requirements in application development. There are several steps to achieving Agility for the entire lifecycle. The first step is to perform a thorough business analysis and review existing, target business processes. Based on the analysis appropriate services that are reusable can be designed and developed. Services can then be developed at either the Enterprise levels or lower levels. Enterprise services such as email and collaboration have been very popular in organizations and agencies, other services can be developed at the business, application and database levels. The integration and workflow aspects of these services have to be defined and then the services are integrated and assembled with the overall solution.

The focus on Agile solutions and services means continuous feedback and adapability to change. For Cloud, Big Data and Mobility this means not just developing and testing individual services, but also the aggregate services. Many vendors are coming up with "Agile solutions". The term Agile is being added to products like never before hence it is important for organizations to do their due diligence to discover what it means. True Agility is realized when it is leveraged not only in the development, but also in the integration of services. Agile development techniques can be successfully leveraged during the Cloud, Big data and Mobile application development lifecycles. In the waterfall approach projects start with specific requirements and then progress through the phases on the life cycle. An Agile strategy and development approach starting with requirements and working through development can be helpful to demonstrate the releases incrementally and iteratively. The continuous feedback aspects of Agile can reduce the risk of having a conglomeration of services that don't work well together. The focus in Agile is on the product being released on a regular basis and releases being determined by regular user feedback to manage changing requirements. Agile development significantly reduces the risks of coming up with a solution that is not what the customer desired.

The Agile products you want to buy are the ones that support full lifecycle management including development and management for various languages and environments. With custom applications that leverage Cloud and Big Data services, one of the important elements is a powerful graphical user interface to support modeling of business processes and services. Point and click capabilities for deployment and release management are also useful. Powerful version control and release management facilitate tracking of Agile releases and to display the dependencies between various elements within releases. The products should also have powerful reporting and business intelligence capabilities.

Such products should enable users to build applications using the Agile processes quicker and develop end to end business solutions with advanced point and click capabilities. The intent is to hasten release cycles and support regular testing. Many vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, HP have solutions that support such processes. Some of the vendors have procured tools or set up partnerships with existing vendors to enhance their toolsets to support Agile processes.

(This has been extracted from and is reference to Ajay Budhraja's blog.)

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