“It’s very, very difficult to predict exactly what we’re going to need to deliver in six months’ time to solve today’s business problem.”
This is the reality for many companies working in the application industry today. The assumptions that previous generations of developers could safely make no longer apply in quite the way they once did.
Far from waterfall
“We are far away from the traditional wonderful waterfall method where we get all the requirements at the beginning and then work until a set deadline and then deliver the whole package,” said software developer Snježana Momić.
Momić is a scrum master for Comtrade, functioning as a kind of team leader in projects using the Agile methodology. She is based in Dublin but manages distributed teams working in the US, Canada and India.
“The problem with it is that it isn’t good when developers are not involved with creating requirements. Often the customer needs help to understand exactly what the best solution to their problem might be. But if they decide in advance what they want, without engaging in consultation with developers, then what they get is limited to what they ask for,” she said.
“What is delivered might not actually be what the customer wanted. With agile, I think customers are more satisfied because they’re more involved in all processes of implementation, not just at the beginning.”
Want and need
Momić’s point is that while the client has a good idea what they want, they do not always know what they need. The traditional way of finding this out is to develop an application and then try to figure out why it doesn’t achieve the goal expected of it. That’s expensive, takes time and is frustrating for everyone involved.
She said that agile offers the possibility of the project morphing and changing as it progresses, with the end result being much more likely to be a success.
“From a business perspective, of course it’s much easier to identify a need, negotiate a contract and then get your app delivered to you. That way you have a delivery date and you know how much it will cost etc. It’s nice and clean,” said Momić. “But with agile we put a much bigger emphasis on customer collaboration than on contract negotiation. We put people first and fully operational software over procedure and I think customers now realise that it’s better to have it this way.”
Management and testing
HP is currently one of the market leaders in the area of application testing management tools, and its suite of test tools is widely used by Irish developers. According to Paul Turley, regional sales manager for HP Software, there is growing pressure on developers to turn applications around quickly.
“Mobile applications are now on a much more rapid release cycle. Amazon for example releases code every 11 seconds, so this is the new world. Netflix and others do it too but if you look at any Irish companies doing mobile application development, be it for airlines or banks or whatever, we’re seeing more and more rapid releases,” he said.
“We enable more rapid development by giving organisations the visibility they need to decide when an application is ready, what defects are open, which defects are critical in terms of how functionality is affected and so on.”
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