Agile development means a lot of things to a lot of people. Depending on what role you have in a software-centric company, agile development might impact you in regards to anything from hiring, to marketing tactics or organizing planning sessions. As a front end developer here at Grasshopper, I’m a member of an agile team of engineers, and have experienced agile from the depths of the development trenches.

With all that can be said about agile and the concepts surrounding it, from my point of view there a few simple things that are absolutely key to finding success using this process: know yourself, know your team, know your project.

Knowledge of self is the first key factor to being able to find success in an agile environment. In order to achieve your goals within small, demanding iterations, you have to be aware of your own limitations within that span of time. Work life, personal life, and everything else in-between can be factors that impact not only the amount of time that is at your disposal during a development cycle, but the level of focus that you will be able to give your tasks. Having a solid understanding of yourself is the first step towards successfully producing high quality work with the rest of your team.

Knowledge of your team is also of the utmost importance to finding success in an agile environment. Understanding and trusting your fellow team members as you develop a piece of software is what truly facilitates the process of making high quality software with limited resources and time. Here at Grasshopper the planning process is very collaborative – with all involved team members being in constant communication as the tasks at hand are analyzed.

A key component for me personally is knowing that I have full confidence in all of the people I work with to evaluate our goals realistically, know themselves and their schedules, and plan accordingly. It’s this kind of trust that truly creates and environment where work can be done full throttle and produce results.

Last, but not least, you have to know your project inside out. I imagine that it’s difficult for new hires entering an agile project already in progress, because in order to achieve the highest level of success with an agile project, you have to know the guts of the project just as well as you know yourself and your team.

Essentially, work produced from a small agile team receives the kind of attention that a 2 year old does – the team tries to nurture and guide the product to be the best that it can be, and only the team who has worked on it really knows what it’s like to have to run around and clean up after the little monster.

So what it all really comes down to is the team. If you can’t trust yourself and your team to truly come together and work towards successful outcomes, then you really don’t have a chance of creating a successful product that you can really be proud of. Thankfully, here at Grasshopper I work with some of the finest players around on our projects, and we’re always only getting better as we continue to learn more about each other and our ever-evolving products. Be sure to keep an eye out for some really impressive new developments from us in the second half of the year!