Published on the 21/10/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
The relatively slow pace of Agile adoption in Asia Pacific is putting many local enterprises at a competitive disadvantage compared to faster moving global peers…
With the development cycle for mobile devices and software down to 8-16 weeks, organisations which don’t embrace Agile methods are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they simply can’t keep up according to Jeff Findlay, Micro Focus’s Borland architect for the region.
“Australia and Asia haven’t embraced Agile as much as they should have and as much as the rest of the world has,” he said, adding that this was leading to enterprises facing higher cost and slower release cycles as under traditional development techniques; “They get half way through a project and say it’s not working.”
The more iterative approach of Agile allows problems to be identified and fixed much earlier in the development cycle he noted.
According to Micro Focus a recent survey of CIOs by research firm Vanson Bourne found that CIOs were on average only able to release mobile updates every five months, which was out of kilter with the 8-16 week mobile technology cycle.
Organisations that cling to waterfall development are at a competitive disadvantage he said because “they can’t adapt quickly enough to the changing market,” said Findlay. And there are no signs of the pace of change slowing according to Findlay who said millions of new applications were being developed each year.
According to new statistics released this month by the Australian Bureau of Statistics almost 20,000 terabytes of data was downloaded using mobile devices in the June quarter – 6000 terabytes more than the previous quarter. The number of smartphone users meanwhile increased 13 percent in the first six months of the year reinforcing consumer appetite for mobile internet services.
But Findlay said statistics showed that the majority of mobile apps being used by consumers were not formally tested.
Besides testing early and often, he said companies which were turning out successful mobile applications understood the demographics of the audience they were attempting to reach. “The younger set is using devices which are not more than 18 months old – but older age bands hold onto their devices for three or four years,” which also needed to be factored into effective testing programmes.
