Great excitement here at CODA over recent weeks as the first version of CODA 2go has now been provisioned to the first early adopters.  This is the result of considerable effort from both the CODA and salesforce.com development teams to get this automated process working smoothly, so congratulations to all those involved in this landmark event. 

The earlier adopters receive a fully packaged version of ‘Order to Cash’ application provisioned into their own dedicated test environment via the trialforce facility from salesforce.com. 

The trial includes:
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- The complete V1 ‘Order to Cash’ application running 100% natively on force.com and integrated ‘out of the box’ with salesforce Account, Opportunity and Product objects.
- Comprehensive supporting user documentation and help systems to guide users through their exploration and testing of the application.
- Pre-populated test data including sample Chart of Accounts, Invoices, Credit Notes, Receipts, Journals and Reports so users can instantly explore the application without any additional setup.
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We’re now working closely with these early adopters to gather their feedback and prepare for general availability.

On the day that the new 3G iPhone finally launches in the UK, I thought it would be fun to show that we have got CODA 2go running not just on an iPhone (see previous post) but also now on a Blackberry.

Here you can see a view of a customer account, and then the menu of actions available to the me:

 

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A commentator to one of our recent posts, Getting Agile, asked for more perspective on our development time frame and resources. Following our statement that we have had a team of 14 people working for over 6 months to get CODA 2go product released, he stated that “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.”

I think a definition of ‘team’ and the product we are creating will provide some depth to the high level answer I gave at recent Tour de Force events:

At least 14 people have ‘worked on’ CODA 2go. This team consists of Product Management, Architects, Functional and Tecchnical Designers, Programmers, Automated Test Engineers, Testing Engineers, Documentation and Marketing. If you add in legal and corporate representatives, the team would rise above that. However, the core scrum team actually producing the product itself consists of 9 people (5 programmers, 3 testers and 1 on documentation). Other individuals are working on this project as well as others.

Not forgetting, of course, that the accounting knowledge and design brought to bear by the team builds on nearly 30 years of intellectual property represented by CODA. We are a 600 person, 14 country organization, part of the 5th largest midrange software author globally, Unit 4 Agresso.

In the 6 months, the team has created an all new, multi-company, multi-lingual, multi-currency accounting service on Force.com. Not only is it seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but it has an extensive workflow engine, deployment to mobile clients (check out the demos running on BlackBerry and iPhone) and many other advanced features. The application has been stress tested, carries full automated regression testing for future releases and we have created and documented pattern based coding  and best practices for developing on Force.com.

I believe that the benefits we have obtained and the speed of delivery are far more than agile, they are revolutionary.

At the same time as the application has been developed, the extended team has been part of the creation of the business model for Platform as a Service (PaaS) with Salesforce.com as well as creating the legal and operational framework around delivering applications in a PaaS environment.

There are many things that an international application developer like CODA will not cut corners on. Right from the design through the coding and testing and having a full time documenter on the project. What we have created and will continue to build, on is a fully scaleable, unified international accounting solution. I really don’t think you will find many world class business applications built in such an aggressive timescale.