ND8 DEVELOPMENT
Best Practice Software Development
© ND8
Monday, August 3, 2009
Agile Development
Agile is so much more than just the mechanics. It’s a different mentality, a different culture. It’s a way of working that requires discipline and flexibility in equal measure. It calls for collaboration, creativity, pragmatism and good judgement. It calls for real commitment from the team, the managers and the stakeholders. Above all it requires courage. The courage to remain disciplined when the burn down is heading the wrong way. The courage to play your part not stand on the side lines. The courage to trust your instincts and judgement, to make decisions early and adapt. The courage to call time when you’re done.
To be truly Agile, you need to complete the circle, using the knowledge that adaptive processes generate, to drive you forward.
ND8 don’t just mentor and coach, we do. We don’t sell training courses or hand out scrum master certificates, we roll up our sleeves and get involved. From day one we’re fully committed, we help fix the issues, we help fix the context and through our approach and actions, we become a real catalyst for cultural change.
We aim to leave your team, with a lasting, sustainable framework, that can continue to be improved long after we’ve left, and a legacy of confidence and success that sets the standard for the next development.
Read the case study from our latest assignment at moneysupermarket.com here.
It all started in 1996, while working for IBM on a Warehouse project for Boots. To develop and deliver the solution we used what was then labelled a RAD method, DSDM, and became hooked.
We had two users as full time team members writing use cases, worked in two week time-boxed iterations, prioritised using MoSCoW, integrated code daily, and used fitness for purpose to assess the quality of the software.
The practises became fundamental to our way of working, playing a substantial part in subsequent success delivering projects and building highly productive development shops.
The subsequent rise of the Agile movement, and Lean, has popularised, added to and enhanced these practises, increased the overall body of knowledge, and provided the tools to do the job.
In 2007 we successfully scaled Scrum to work on an integrated development programme involving over 100 development staff, including third party vendors.
In 2009 we worked with moneysupermarket.com, employing OpenUP to successfully deliver on time, to budget and to high levels of customer satisfaction.
We’ll continue to employ Agile to deliver software solutions whenever practicable because, simply put, it delivers better solutions, faster