Agile Development for Cascade Integrations
Kat Liendgens, Services Manager, Hannon Hill
It is a fact that many, actually most, IT projects fail. Why is that? Some of the most frequent reasons that have been identified are constantly changing requirements, lack of understanding of the requirements, lack of client involvement, unrealistic time estimates, and lack of progress monitoring. This should be no surprise considering the nature of the traditional "waterfall" development approach that many organizations have been following over the past decades.
Waterfall development means that a lot of time is spent upfront on requirements gathering. After the requirements gathering has been completed, the software is developed over a long time-frame, and the next time the client sees the product is when everything has been implemented. By that time, requirements may have already changed, or initial miscommunication during the planning process has resulted in a product that is quite different from what the client actually wanted. The result can be a dissatisfied client, a stressed-out project manager, and a software team that may end up having to work overtime to basically "re-do" the project.
Enter SCRUM, one of the agile methodologies that has steadily been gaining momentum in modern development shops. Last year, in an effort to maximize their productivity and quality of work, both the Hannon Hill Engineering Team and the Services Team re-shaped their own development approach to be more agile. While the Engineering Team has completely adopted the SCRUM methodology as specified by Ken Schwaber, the Services Team implemented a slightly modified agile approach. Both teams have seen increased productivity and higher stakeholder satisfaction as a result of this new approach.
This presentation explains the main differences between the traditional waterfall methodology and agile approaches. Using the Hannon Hill Services Team as a case study, this session will outline what worked and what didn't when using SCRUM as a method for Cascade integration projects. In addition, the benefits of agile development will be illustrated, as well as the challenges that you may encounter. Finally, this presentation will offer some pointers on how you can make agile development work for you, even in organizations for which adopting this approach would require a tremendous paradigm shift.