Agile development
A structure for continuous iteration

Blocky, the Ad Hoc mascot, reaching up for a user story on a board in an agile development workflow.

How well can your software development teams respond to change? In government, this is one of the fundamental questions behind successful digital teams.

Agile development is a core operating principle that allows Ad Hoc’s teams to react quickly and deliver value early and often for our customers. With agile, agencies can create self-organizing and cross-functional teams that can respond to the changing needs of people while remaining flexible to the evolution of requirements, resource availability, and understanding of the problem space.

Ad Hoc’s common agile frameworks:

SAFe®
Scrum
Kanban

Traditional software development methods focus on lengthy requirements that don’t allow agencies to build products in increments that enable responding to feedback. These methods can cause serious risks to the on-time delivery of products that meet people’s needs.

Agile development allows agencies to move from requirement lists to continuous iteration so they can update and improve digital services to meet user needs. Agile development provides an organizing structure that allows for rapid, flexible iteration when combined with Ad Hoc’s other foundational competencies.

Combining agile and human-centered design

Ad Hoc layers our Continuous Discovery & Delivery approach over common frameworks like SAFe to drive value for users and the organization while enabling a more effective delivery flow.

Discovery focuses on producing, testing, and validating product ideas.

Delivery works on turning those ideas into an actual product.

These two tracks operate in unison on the same cadence by the same team. This combines the goals of agile development and human-centered design to create a faster, more efficient flow of work.

Case study

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ad Hoc used agile development methods to quickly help the Department of Veterans Affairs add vaccination scheduling to an existing tool while constantly adjusting to new requirements.

Agile development focuses on:

Iterative and incremental delivery

Collaborative development

Building the right thing

Managing change

Interoperability

Full lifecycle development

Together, these capabilities allow agencies to have great confidence in custom software development while building solutions that are tailored to the needs of their users and the constraints of their agencies.