Getting Agile
Its not often you’d get branded a pig or a chicken without taking offence, but in Agile terms you’re either one or the other. You’re either in the Scrum team getting your hands dirty, in which case you’re a pig, or looking in on the periphery keeping a close eye in which case you’re a chicken.
CODA 2go is the first project CODA has run using the Agile methodology Scrum. It’s a very different approach to the more traditional Waterfall model of software development often adopted at CODA.
The Scrum team itself is a multi-disciplinary team made up of designers, developers, testers, automated testers and documenters all working in close proximity. We have some very skilled people and a strong sense of ownership and team-working which really helps to drive the construction forward. The team as a whole, headed up by the Scrum master, make decisions on a day to day basis to make sure we can deliver what we’ve signed up to do.
It’s been quite a learning curve and a big adjustment to the way we work but I think the benefits really show. We were able to show off the end to end process of invoice generation through to printing at the end of the third sprint without the use of smoke and mirrors! The process somewhat de-risks a project by providing software early and iteratively. By giving it almost immediate visibility to the product owners the direction of the project can be continually reviewed and altered to meet the business needs.
We’re now 12 sprints in and we’ve designed, written, tested and documented some first class software and I think we can be proud of what we’ve achieved.
Tony Scott, Software Developer, CODA 2go. 8th May 2008.
Tags: Add new tag
June 26th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
I just attended the Tour de Force and saw the presentation from your president. I also learned that you had a team of 14 people working for over 6 months to get this product released.
This is the same sort of time frame I would expect from a ‘traditional’ approach and/or like one based upon .NET.
This may be agile but it is not what I would call rapid. Can you give me some perspective on this please.
Thanks
Geoff
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Hi Geoff - thanks for your comment, I’ve actually written a response to your comment as a post, you’ll find it here: http://blog.coda2go.com/2008/07/02/the-team-behind-coda-2go/
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Geoff. I’m sure Jeremy’s comments will help you understand the nature of our development effort to date on CODA 2go. Its absolutely true that salesforce platform enables its customers and partners to very rapidly add customization and new functionality to an existing salesforce.com instance and there are really impressive developments created in a matter of hours and days. However when it comes to developing a fully packaged and maintained application on the platform that we expect to be widely downloaded and used in many, many separate instances globally this is a much more significant development process.