SaaS is still the new kid on the block and the friendship between SaaS and Agile brings forward few interesting aspects. The most important aspect in applying the Agile Methodology in any given organization is – its impact on the team structure. More precisely the distribution of the team is a critical success factor in enabling the implemented Agile process to either be a success, or be a foul strategy implementation.
Advantages:
Team Restructure: Team Restructuring can be advantageous if the distribution of the team allows all the senior resources to be divided into smaller teams and are paired with junior resources to help them out. This gives higher responsibilities to the senior members and the junior members get a chance to be mentored closely.
Identifying leaders: Agile methodology especially in the SaaS environment will provide numerous opportunities for team members to demonstrate their strengths. This should be used by the senior management to groom the key members according their strengths and future aspirations.
Long Term Investment: Implementation of Agile Methodology by a company which is developing/testing a SaaS based application would need modifications over the span of time. Agile allows different teams to much more involved in the process leading to better awareness about product design and inter team dependencies
Challenges observed:
Meeting the Deadlines: Agile methodology claims that the time taken for Developing, deploying and Testing is cut down to almost half than what is available in the Traditional System. The developers and testers need to be cognizant about performance and security aspects and the added boundaries of timelines may add to the workload.Delayed ROI: For the Top Executives, the top brass would want to see far reaching results in terms of impact and ROI for the new methodology to be implemented. Less ROI in the initial stages may deny the methodology of the executive support required to withstand initial roadblocks. SaaS model already has longer breakeven periods for providers and any further delays would be watched very closely.
