Business stakeholders and DevOps teams both have to take an active approach to app development, but neither faction should have to change practices and processes in order to get their needs across. Investing the time to establish communication between these teams will drive delivery of the applications customers demand.

Many teams think they are agile in their projects, but if you're not receiving and analyzing feedback regularly, you're not really agile. Plotting the feedback you get on a chart throughout your sprints can help you see whether you have a lag. Read on to learn how to gather and use your feedback to be truly agile.

Communication is always vital on an agile project to ensure everyone is on the same page, but it's perhaps most important in a relationship between a vendor and a customer. Here, Marcus Blankenship relates a personal story about a project where communication failed, and gives some good tips for how to avoid it happening to you.

Instead of choosing what to develop based solely on a cold, hard dollar amount, you might try approaching the person who originally requested a story—or who will be most affected by it—and asking, “What benefit will this bring you?” Armed with a list of stakeholders and interests, you can find out the real difference a story will make.