Introduction
Software development is a complex, fluid domain. New technologies have emerged, and Flexible approaches to software development have been created to address this issue. One of these is Adaptive Software Development (ASD).
The development culture of the technology industry is fast-paced, and the truth is that companies need to be agile enough to adapt. A project can be made or lost based on its ability to evolve. Adaptive Software Development (ASD) offers that ability — a software development methodology that teaches participants how to deal with uncertainty and change. In other words, it helps you become more flexible. ASD is a software development methodology that places special emphasis on flexibility and learning and is particularly suited for regularly changing projects.
This blog strives to provide a basic, straightforward explanation of Adaptive Software Development. So whether you’re an ASD newbie or just interested in understanding how software projects are managed in the real world today, you’ll come away with a clear sense of what is adaptive software development and how it works.
What is Adaptive Software Development?
Adaptive Software Development (ASD) is a methodology that can cope with rapid change and uncertainty. The traditional software development model is the Waterfall method, in which there is a planning phase, a design phase, a build phase, and a testing phase, and each of these is carried out in turn: you can’t start testing until you’ve built the thing, for instance. The problem with this approach is that it can’t accommodate change once the development process has started.
Where the old approach would tell you to stick to a plan, ASD declares: speculate, collaborate, and learn. At its core, ASD does not concern itself with a particular plan of action but rather with three concepts that continuously engage the team: speculate, collaborate, and learn.
‘Speculate, don’t plan.’ What ASD researchers call ‘speculation’ is particularly absent in the early planning stages of classic engineering design. Instead, the ASD team makes educated guesses about how to proceed based on the best data they have. Rather than striving to create a perfect plan at the outset, the team plans enough to get the development process underway and then allows the plan to evolve as new data emerge.
Collaborative: ASD stresses the importance of continual collaboration among all team members and stakeholders. With tight communication and teamwork, the project can react quickly to shifting requirements or obstacles.
Learn: Learning is the core principle of ASD. As the project unfolds, the team is encouraged to look back and ask what’s working and what isn’t, enabling them to make better decisions and adapt the development process to meet the project’s goals.
In a nutshell, Adaptive Software Development is about responding to change, even when the change is caused by yourself. As a result, it’s an iterative process, as opposed to a single cyclic process. Instead of one enormous loop, you work a rapid series of small, repeatable cycles – each iteration resulting in feedback that can help you improve your software.
Core Principles of Adaptive Software Development
To understand ASD more clearly, let’s break down its three main principles:
- Speculate
A traditional approach to software development is to start with a detailed plan of what you plan to achieve and then spend months or years coding to that plan. If the requirements don’t change and all goes to plan, this is a fine way to proceed, but in a world where requirements and the marketplace are constantly evolving, it can often be too rigid. By the time you’ve finally finished, there’s a good chance that your original plan will no longer make sense for the business or the user.
In Adaptive Software Development, the guess becomes speculation: there is no assumption that what the team can ‘plan’ assumes the team can see into the future. Rather, they ‘speculate’ based on the best information they have as to how the project might proceed – and as the project proceeds, they are open to change and new information.
The speculation phase involves taking action with enough information to start the project without over-planning—but not too much information. As the project evolves, new insights will influence the direction, ensuring that the software evolves with the business needs.
- Collaborate
Central to ASD is the notion of collaboration—involving team members, stakeholders, and users working together and in close contact throughout the development process. Communication is important. Team members must continually check in with each other, provide feedback, and make changes.
The focus on collaboration means that all voices can be heard, not just the developers but also end-users and stakeholders who might have important information about how data or other capabilities are being used. If something isn’t working as intended or a new feature or requirement is needed, the team can respond in real-time without the risks of misunderstanding or lost communication that can occur without such a close working relationship.
This is different from workflows, where a developer might meet with business stakeholders once or twice during a project’s life cycle. In ASD, collaboration between developers and stakeholders is ongoing, and the project can adjust itself as business needs evolve.
- Learn
Perhaps the most novel aspect of ASD is its emphasis on learning. The team is not bound by a given method and plan but is encouraged to learn as it goes. Mistakes are not seen as failures but as a means to learn.
At the very least, this means regularly checking in on the project, examining what’s working, and tweaking as needed. Perhaps the team discovered that some of the assumptions they made in the speculation phase were in error. Or maybe they discover a better way to achieve their goals. The continual learning and iteration process enables the team to create better software, improving its efficacy and efficiency over time.
The ASD Life Cycle in Simple Terms
Adaptive software development follows the principles of an iterative process, meaning that the project is broken down into smaller cycles, each containing speculation, collaboration, and learning. Here is a simplified description of how the ASD life cycle works:
Speculation: Early on in each cycle, the team examines what we know about the project and guesses about how to proceed. We build a plan based on this speculation, but we expect it to change as new information comes to light.
Collaboration: Once the team starts working, collaboration is constant. Developers, testers, and stakeholders collaborate to produce the software; everyone works together and is on the same page. Feedback is gathered constantly, and adjustments are made to the process.
Learning: At the end of each cycle, the team reflects on what it has learned—what went well, what didn’t, and what it has learned about the world, the problem, and itself. They might see new requirements or areas for improvement that they hadn’t previously considered. The team adapts the plan accordingly for the next cycle and starts again.
This cycle continues until the software is complete. The iterative nature of ASD allows the team to be agile, accommodating to change, and deliver software to meet the changing needs of the business over time.
Key Benefits of Adaptive Software Development
So why use Adaptive Software Development vs other methods? Here are a few of the key advantages:
- Flexibility
ASD’s greatest strength is flexibility. Old-school development models are based on a plan-then-build-to-the-plan strategy, where the plan is fixed until the final delivery. This makes it hard to deviate from the plan without incurring delays or cost overruns. ASD is designed to handle changes at any point before delivery, making it a good fit for projects where the requirements evolve as new information becomes available.
- Collaboration
An important aspect of ASD is fostering ‘collaboration’ between all team members and stakeholders so that everyone is on the same page throughout the project and feedback can be handled quickly and efficiently. Open communication within ASD decreases the risk of misunderstandings or mismatched expectations and leads to better results for the project as a whole.
- Faster Delivery
As the acronym suggests, because ASD is iterative, the working software can be delivered sooner than with conventional methods. With every iteration, stakeholders can see a working version of the software rather than a vague description of requirements. This means that, again, because of the iterative nature of ASD, features can be released as they are built rather than all at once when the project is complete. The sooner businesses can start to use software, the sooner they will start realizing the value of the investment.
- Continuous Improvement
In ASD, the project is not finished in the conventional sense. It is always being built upon – its current iteration stands on the shoulders of all the others that came before it – so that it can continue to serve its purpose (or purposes) indefinitely, finding new ways to respond to new challenges or opportunities.
Differences Between Adaptive Software Development and Agile
Adaptive Software Development is sometimes confused with Agile, another popular methodology for software development. While there are some similarities between the two, the two approaches do have certain differences.
Similarities
Both ASD and Agile prioritize collaboration between team members and stakeholders.
They both work in iterations, producing a project in a series of smaller cycles or sprints.
Both approaches emphasize continuous feedback and learning so teams can respond to new information and change requirements.
Differences
Emphasize adaptation: As opposed to Agile, which stresses iterative releases of working software via sprints, ASD focuses on learning and iterative adoption of the software on the fly. In ASD, you’re trying to learn as you go and iterate the software via real-world feedback, whereas Agile is more about delivering features in a regular timeframe.
Speculation: One of the key features of the ASD process is speculation rather than detailed planning. Rather than creating a detailed plan to guide the project’s execution, the team speculates how it will develop based on the information available to them. This approach gives the team more flexibility because it is not locked into a detailed plan but is free to follow the process as it evolves.
Learning As One Of The Core Principles: While both Agile and ASD encourage learning, ASD emphasizes learning as a formal step in the process. After each iteration, you reflect on what’s working and not working and work to improve the software and the development process itself.
Real-World Examples of Adaptive Software Development
So here’s how one of the cycles might play out in practice:
Suppose you are developing a mobile app for a startup that helps users track their fitness goals. The initial assumption made by the team is that the app should track steps and calories burned, so a basic version of the app is released accordingly. After testing the app with users, however, the team learned that people are more interested in tracking how much water they drink and how much they sleep.
Rather than following the original plan, the team takes this feedback and adapts the app by adding features for tracking water intake and sleep. They also deprioritize a feature that users find less useful and continue to work with stakeholders and learn from feedback, adapting to user needs.
With ASD, the team can provide users with a product that better responds to their changing needs while the product is being developed.
Challenges of Adaptive Software Development
As beneficial as Adaptive Software Development is, teams can encounter some challenges when using it. Below is an instruction that describes a task paired with input that provides further context. Write a response that appropriately completes the request.
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Below is an instruction that describes a task, paired with an input that provides further context. Write a response that appropriately completes the request.
Although Adaptive Software Development has numerous advantages, there are a few typical difficulties that teams may face:
- Managing Uncertainty
Crucially, one key principle embedded within ASD is ‘The team does not know everything at the onset.’ Often, this is a tough pill to swallow for teams or stakeholders who are used to a project stage-gate process, where the target outcomes for development are fully defined before any work is kicked off. This ability to successfully manage uncertainty requires a different way of thinking about our work.
- Effective Communication
Because ASD requires collaboration, communication is critical. Without it, the project can be held up as miscommunications create a situation where team members might be on different pages. Make sure to maintain regular communications throughout the project.
- Strong Leadership
Within ASD, leaders are essential to keeping the team-centered, maintaining collaboration, and keeping the project moving forward. Leaders must manage uncertainty, foster a learning culture, and help the team stay centered. Without good leadership, the project could easily get derailed or lose steam.
When to Use Adaptive Software Development
Adaptive Software Development is particularly well-suited for projects where the requirements are unknown or likely to change. Here are some examples of situations in which ASD might be appropriate:
Startups or New Product Development: Requirements often change, and it’s hard to know how the market will respond to your product from the outset. ASD’s flexibility fits these kinds of projects.
Projects with Evolving Requirements: If the project is likely to evolve as more information is learned or stakeholders still don’t know exactly what they want, ASD allows the team to adapt to this.
Big, fuzzy projects: ASD is useful for big, fuzzy projects whose requirements cannot be definitively known upfront.
Conclusion
With its emphasis on speculation, collaboration, and learning, the Adaptive Software Development approach is well suited to the dynamic nature of today’s tech businesses.
Whether you’re iterating on the next version of a product for which requirements are still unclear or working on a large project with constantly evolving priorities, ASD can support you to stay agile, learn as you go, and ship better software. By embracing change and turning your attention to constant improvement, you can ensure your software projects stay current, effective, and responsive to the people using them.
In an industry where the only certainty is uncertainty, Adaptive Software Development is a tool that can help us all understand the dynamics of modern software development.
Reference
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