Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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Agile Development Goes On-Demand

I had breakfast this morning with Tim Miller, CEO of an exciting software firm in Boulder, Colorado. Rally Development focuses on providing products and training for the Agile lifecycle management, using an on-demand subscription basis. Started in 2002, the company has 50 employees with a growing list of customers, such as BMC, Shopzilla, Sun Microsystems, TimeWarner, and Verizon.

Two points from our discussion stood out...

First, the Agile Methodology is directly appliable to BI development because its objectives are to provide "early and continuous delivery of valuable software" and to be receptive to constantly changing requirements. These objectives match the nature of successful BI efforts. The rigor of the Agile Methodology is certainly desired to the usual 'cowboy coding' practices.

Second, this workflow management is ideal for geographically dispersed group to coordinated their efforts. Thomas Friedman noted that workflow management software was one of the ten 'flattening forces' that fuels globalization. I asked Tim about whether their customers used their product in geographic dispersed teams. He said teams that are 'two doors or a floor away' are already dispersed and might as well be located in India. He estimated that about a third of their customer base is using their product to coordinate offshore groups. An interesting twist was that handing off tasks to later timezones was not an advantage with the Agile Methodology because tasks are decomposed into modules assigned to small self-contained groups, rather than sequencing among groups.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Wednesday, 23 August 2006 | Permalink