How Ruby on Rails Supports Agile Development Framework
Agile development process is an approach aimed at improving the speed and making the development process easy especially for database-driven websites. Having a clear set of goals, planning, adaptability, continual improvements, and iterative delivery is what Agile Development emphasizes. The iterative delivery guarantees successful completion and smooth working of the product. This process also involves the client which provides feedbacks where ever it is necessary thereby, by the end of the product development cycle, all the expectations of the client are met and delivered on time. This also ensures that during development, if there's any bug, error, or any changes to be made in the end product is done right away and reduces the difficulty.Getting these changes done later in that final production phase is time-consuming. Having the developers and clients in a single loop of communication or on a single platform instills the factor of trust and confidence of the client on the development team. All the development aspects of the product are carried under a defined time period with fairly simple documentation required. All in all, it promotes a rapid development environment with defined tasks and timelines, allowing developers to deliver the solution in a short period of time.
All of these aspects of agile development are supported by Ruby on Rails and many startups and established organizations are recognizing the same. The reason why Ruby on Rails is widely associated with agile is the fact that it needs fewer lines of code and minimal configuration to get the whole web application running.
Let's take a look at reasons why Ruby on Rails is preferred for Agile development :
DRY Principle: Ruby on Rails utilizes the DRY ( Don't Repeat Yourself ) principle, which allows the developers to avoid duplication or repetition of lines of code while coding and in turn reducing the number of errors. One of the primary reasons behind the creation of Rails.
Convention Over Configuration: Rails provides the developers with a set structure and conventions to use. This allows developers to focus more on the code logic rather than configuring and build the structure from the ground up. And with Rails using the REST API as a service layer between client and server, it makes it easy to connect different components in the web application. Also, the availability of the huge library of gems makes it easy for the developers to develop virtually any kind of feature or type of web application. This characteristic aids in the iterative development cycle of the Agile development process.
ROR MVC Architecture: MVC architecture is what Ruby on Rails heavily banks on. MVC ( Model-View-Controller). How it provides an advantage? It separates your business logic and UI. This makes it easy to develop individual components, update or maintain them. Also since it separates the entities of the project a team of developers can work individually work on then and separate aspects of the project and gives a clear view on overalls of the web application.
Client involvement in the Software development cycle: Since the agile development process emphasizes on iterative development and delivery. Rails allow developers to quickly develop and deliver the project. This is done by dividing the project into smaller deployable features. This further identifies the area of improvements or if there's any change needed to be done. Since the end client is on-board of development, with help of feedback in the early stages of development makes it easy to implement any changes that are needed rather than having the project ready and then get feedback on improvement. The incremental delivery in agile development process is called "Sprints". These sprints are the tasks that are bound by a certain time period within which it needs to be worked on have it ready.
So in conclusion, with RoR's characteristics such as rapid development, the ability to let the cross-functional teamwork at the same time, the clear MVC architecture, client involvement in the development cycle... all adhere to the agile development needs and makes Ruby on rails a very much favored framework for Agile Software development process. Many reputated web application development companies use agile software development process for a smoother overall development to deployment cycle and ensuring to meet all the requirements of the client.
The author of this article is backed with strong experience of 10 years in the web, mobile and software development industry with a reputed ruby on rails web development company.
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