Scaling Agile With ZolonTech. Transform your Organization today with Agile Application Development

Transcription

1 Scaling Agile With ZolonTech Transform your Organization today with Agile Application Development

2 ABSTRACT AGILE DEVLOPMENT To face many of the challenges and frustrations around slow and unproductive software development, a group of software leaders created the Agile manifesto in A manifesto for improving software development process by implementing Agile values and principles. It was a big change from the traditional software development methodology, in its early infancy private and commercial companies boldly embraced this new change while the majority of government agencies did not adopt Agile. But with time, Agile methodologies spread with success stories across the industry. Government took notice and started implementing Agile. Zolon Tech, Inc. (ZTI), an early adopter of Agile, has helped government transition to implement Agile successfully. Through these methodologies, ZTI has put customers first, by understanding the problem, analyzing the problem and coming up with rapid solutions that are aligned with the specific needs of the customers. Implementing Agile is not simple as following a simple set of steps, often which could lead to failures, such as the debut rollout of HealthCare.gov and other government project failures. For Agile to be a success, the development team implementing Agile has to Be Agile. At ZTI, Agile is supported from the executive level, empowering our employees to be more passionate about being Agile and in turn being more productive and efficient to develop a better product. Our employees live the Agile way with their years of experience on various government projects. A most recent success story was helping the Department of State (DoS), Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) adopt the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This paper aims to address the key challenges faced in scaling Agile development, and how ZTI has faced those challenges to bring success to DoS. ZTI is committed for customer satisfaction and is on a persistent path to drive innovation and success by delivering the service excellence to our customers.

3 Contents Introduction... 1 Case Study... 2 Is Agile For You?... 5 How ZolonTech can help your organization transition to Agile?... 7 Next Steps... 8 Conclusion... 10

4 Introduction Since the inception of ZolonTech, Inc. (ZTI), ZTI has always put customers first, relentless in innovation and always in the lookout for best tools and practices that can benefit our customers. ZTI was no stranger to the traditional waterfall method for software development, which was the industry s norm for more than three decades. Although our implementation of waterfall methodologies for software development were success during our early days of working with the government, it was not the case for many others implementing the same. Many firms faced cost overruns, project delays, unused or redundant features, excessive bugs and many other flaws that fail to meet user expectations that often drive projects into multi-million dollar failures. Agile Methodologies have promising techniques that overcame the challenges faced by waterfall. Simply put, Agile is set of values and principles for developing software, with the primary goal of deploying software by short incremental and iterative processes. Being Agile shortens the time to release working software by giving more value to individuals and interactions, actively engaging with customers and a system designed to accept change at any time of the development process. With promise of speed, reliability and flexibility, Agile development is perfect for government projects where problems are complex and delivery on time is of the utmost importance. However, not many IT service providers have implemented this new change, due to the huge effort required to re-organize an existing structure and corporate mindset of inability to change, as long as the existing process is fueling their business. At ZTI, the shift to Agile was fortified from corporate level, meticulous planning and care was given for Agile transformation, with our employees being trained by industry experts. With so many added benefits of Agile, it comes as no surprise that our widely talented workforce, were enthusiastic of the change and were able to adopt quickly to these new changes. Agile helped nourish our development team with a discipline to constantly produce a working software and constantly refine the software from testing and feedback in order to produce the best quality output. With a well-trained workforce, ZTI was able to get in the Agile game early, which gave itself a competitive edge. However, ZTI s main goal was not to beat the competition, but to provide innovative, cost-effective and proven technology solutions to our customers. ZolonTech 1

5 Case Study ZTI s ongoing project involves an Operations Support and Maintenance contract, providing technical and analytical support, software maintenance, and modernization of CA applications for the Department of State s Bureau of Consular Affairs. Our Agile development team is currently developing six mission-critical applications for CA: Consular Affairs Domestic Support Suite, Consular Workload Statistic System, Automated Cash Register System, Automated Cash Register, Consular Affairs Legislation Tracking Application and Consular Shared Tables. Using Scaled Agile Framework, we provide incremental deployment s via two-week sprints in a threemonth product increment roadmap. Our solutions begins with sprint 0, a sprint planning meeting, where our development teams review the product backlog and decide the subset of user stories that will be developed in the upcoming sprint. The decisions made are a result of a collaborative approach between the team represented by a ZTI Scrum Master, the Project Manager and the Product Owner. Our Agile teams are equipped with the most productive tools in the market for smoothly conducting their day-to-day operations; this includes IBM Jazz (IBM Rational Team Concert Suite). An application of suite from IBM Jazz is used for configuration change requests with real-time tracking of applications in product backlogs. ZTI follows the central CM processes for all enhancement requests. We ask the stakeholders which CCRs they will approve for a release, and we participate in planning meetings with database engineering and enterprise architecture groups to plan the future direction of and enhancements to our applications. ZTI employs several techniques to incorporate bugs into development sprints. Being agile, bugs are fixed on a needed basis, by creating a triage group to define the defects and priority once QA identifies them. These defects depending on size and severity are added to the current sprint or sent to Product Backlog for future sprint or release. Figure 1 shows a typical 2-week sprint cycle that is currently being implemented. Figure 1 Sprint Cycle ZolonTech 2

6 Tracking progress is an important aspect in software development. It helps the team ensure that they are on the right track and aids them to maintain their planned schedule. At ZTI, we employ various tools, which are custom designed to meet the specific project requirements. For our DoS CA project, no specific tool was specified by the government to report progress to product owners and key stakeholders. Therefore, we created our own tool and technique for reporting. First we imported data from IBM Jazz into a excel worksheet and we used custom algorithms and code through macros to analyze this data through excel, which provides the most versatile way to view and track progress. The excel spreadsheet lets us view and analyze data Story wise, Sprint wise, product wise, feature wise, and can be drilled down to task level along with individuals who work on it. At the heart of this worksheet is a dashboard where an overview of the complete product increment details are displayed. The dashboard shown in the below figure 2 shows time spent on each feature, task project wise and also shows the time estimated for the feature to be completed. This allows for easy analysis on how tasks are being completed and to easily understand what tasks are taking more time then estimated and allows the team to discuss how to tackle the tasks in future to meet the estimate. Figure 2 Main Dashboard The dashboard was designed primarily for the development team and the scrum master to ensure the work is on schedule and to determine the efficiency of work being done. Key stakeholders from DoS- CA require a more high level reports, for which ZTI, has developed postcards, which is automatically generated from excel macros to provide only the information required by the government. ZolonTech 3

7 Figure 3 Postcard reports The postcards from the above figure 3, provides an overview of features and stories completed task project wise in a single sprint. ZolonTech 4

8 Is Agile For You? According to an IBM study, only 40% of software development projects meet schedule. A report done by the Standish Group shows the failure rate of IT projects every 2 years since 1994 and in a 2014 study of more than 4,000 IT projects resulted in a success rate of less than 20%. This low success rate is due to companies still employing the traditional waterfall methodology to develop software, which is a methodology filled with developmental constraints that limits to address the challenges faced by the rapidly evolving modern world. In many projects, especially the government the product requirements are complex and fluctuate with time based on changing policies, regulations, budgets and once the product is more visible, which is usually at the end in case of a Waterfall development. Waterfall methodology flaws by not supporting any changes or the flexibility to add new features once the process begins. The more complex the project greater the chances of uncertainty of future problems and risks. Agile development at ZTI allows for working software from early stages of development and its iteration cycles are designed in such a way that allows for faster and easier adoption to new changes, and the ability to tackle any challenge at any given time. At ZTI the primary goal is to understand and fulfil or customer s requirements and treat their problem as our problem. We understand that for market sensitive applications, it is essential to release a product within a given time (the most notable example is health insurance Healhcare.gov). Through our Agile expertise, we can produce a basic version of the software more quickly and it can easily be iterated over time to reach the software s full potential. These small incremental releases have an added side benefit of identifying any issues early on and help better manage the risk of failure. ZolonTech 5

9 At ZTI, Agile values and principles provide the foundations for our software development practices. Through these values and principles, ZTI promotes customer integration and employee integration, which allows for a software development approach with rapid delivery of the product, meeting all customer s requirements and with highest of quality. ZTI customers will have a unique opportunity to be involved throughout the development process with a very cooperative collaborative approach to increase visibility on the project s progress and the quality of the product itself. Having said that, one would expect a 100% success rate those who have implemented Agile, practically that is not the case. Implementing Agile did solve many of the problems traditional software developments methodologies faced, in fact by the same study conducted by the Standish group, they reported Agile implementation results in three times more success rate then the waterfall method and a failure rate of less than 9%. The primary reasons for Agile to be more successful is that Agile teams develop in short iterations and finish product increments within a sprint to have potentially deployable product which greatly reduces risk. At ZTI we focus on user collaboration on Agile projects which helps to ensure the team is building the right solution and incorporating feedback to each sprint to deliver product on time successfully, consistently! For your organization to implement an Agile project and benefit from it, it must truly transform itself to embrace this new technology, we do not ask you to do it alone, ZTI is here to help with its years of experience and expertise, we can bring efficiency, quality, performance, satisfaction and support that no other technology firm can bring. ZolonTech 6

10 How ZTI can help your organization transition to Agile? Agile is not simply implementing the methods and follow certain steps in day to day operations, Agile is a culture, Agile is a set of values and principles that teams follow in every decision they make. The decisions made will result in development of the software more efficiently, which results in better quality and better customer value, consistently. Therefore, decisions play an important role in agile software development; one wrong decision could turn a project sideways, but fear not, ZTI has you covered with its exceptionally well-trained teams and certified developers. All our teams are immensely experienced from a wide array of projects mostly from the federal government, making them agile to the core and every decision made by them leads to success. Agile is not completely new to Government projects, an article from Information Week about 3 Agile Government Myths, Busted finds that Agile practices in Government were used as early as in 1950 s, where it was known as Project Mercury with half-day iterations and test-first development. There are many challenges for modern Government projects transition to new methodologies such as Agile, one of the most important reasons for neglecting is the lack of trust to a new methodology, and the lack of knowledge. Fear not, because ZTI will bear your problems on our shoulder and lead your projects in an Agile way that is not only successful but also with the best quality. We strongly believe that there is no better IT firm then ZolonTech Inc., which can implement the Scaled Agile Framework to tackle the government challenges with their tight requirements, budgets and timely delivery. ZolonTech 7

11 At ZolonTech Inc. we strongly believe in customer and employee collaboration, we encourage that the development team maintain a close relationship with the customer to get the most out of the product and to provide utmost customer satisfaction. With iterative development, product increments are delivered faster and changes are accepted rapidly than ever before, this means frequent communication among team members and with product owners occurs to ensure stability in the development process. At ZTI, we understand that in government projects, that your product owners may only have limited time to offer their inputs and feedback over the duration of the project. With ZTI s Scaled Agile Framework, we provide a unique solution to face this hurdle; trained professionals at ZTI act as proxy product owners that are responsible for defining and prioritizing features and enabling them through analysis to maximize the value of the product and ensure that all the requirements are met throughout the duration of the project. ZolonTech 8

12 Next Steps The change from implementing Agile can easily be seen; better user satisfaction, fewer bugs in the software, greater project visibility, early access to working software, room for improvement, productive customer involvement in development, and rapid innovative solutions are just a few among many others. If your organization is unable to enjoy these benefits just ask yourself; what is the current state of your IT development process? Is it experiencing cost overruns, behind schedule, unsatisfied with the result, and inflexible to changes? The solution to your problems is not far away. Be Agile with ZolonTech Inc., and transform your organization to bring quality and success at every nook and corner. ZolonTech 9

13 Conclusion At ZTI we redefine Scaled Agile framework to meet the challenges faced by modern government projects and provide the best in class product by incorporating Agile values and principles in our day to day operation of the software development lifecycle. At ZTI we use this power to provide maximum empowerment to the teams and effective synchronization between them for efficient delivery of high quality product, continuously. BY effectively utilizing the iterative and incremental capabilities of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), along with frequent inspection and adoption, ZTI is capable of focusing on the core product even in complex and dynamic environments, to provide higher quality product to our customers. At ZolonTech Inc., improvement and innovation is a common practice with successful solutions and proven excellence in product delivery PARK CENTER ROAD, SUITE 500 HERNDON, VA ZolonTech 10