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Agile Methodology

From tinkering applications to software business solutions

Cornel Fatulescu
Cornel Fatulescu
CTO for France and Germany at Globant

From bright ideas to business solutions it is a long way and we all know that the best measure of success is progress. So we need to answer the following requirements:

  1. You need to go FAST!
  2. You need to go FASTER!
  3. You need to be the FASTEST!

There is nothing wrong with this approach from the business point of view. Good time to market means “competitiveness” and sometimes even “continuing to exist”.But business is also about remaining competitive on a long perspective and when it comes to software development this could have a major drawback. You’ll have to adapt, improve your solution, insert new features so that you gain more share and benefit or just to remain on top. This is where “faster is slower dynamics” apply: your enterprise application doesn’t scale up, you need to add a mobile application but you didn’t thought enough, your application is not stable or secure and now it seems that separation of concerns was doubtful respected. The main topic around the development team is technical debt and they insist on rewriting/refactoring the application. Never felt that? Ok, you can still read my post so that you’ll diminish the need of quick and dirty in your future implementations.There are lots of reasons you may encounter similar situations but most of them could be treated or at least identified and planned in one particular phase of the project, probably the most important one: project preparation phase. This is where I and my pool of experts share a very important mission in Pentalog:  assisting the client and his team in making the best choices and treating also those concerns that the entire organization may not be aware yet.After almost 2 decades of experience in launching IT projects, Pentalog proudly announces the appearance of “Start me up!”, a complete framework based on a subset of components:

  1. Team calibration
  2. Project feasibility
  3. Manufacturing
  4. Continuous improvement

Depending on your needs you may choose which subset fit you the most on your future projects.Starting from project goals to skills management, within team calibration framework, during project launch, you can achieve skills map, team evaluation, organizational chart, integration roadmaps and trainings. If you work already with People Centric, most of the team evaluation part should be already done. In average the length of this phase is 2 days.Everybody should understand the benefits of products and services! Therefore the entire team, from business stakeholders to software engineers, need to have the same vision on these benefits, and we enhance that within one of the core components of project feasibility framework, called business value framework. Together with risks management, wastes checklist, visibility, planning and estimation tools, around 3 days in average, should help you determine at this early stage the feasibility and major obstacles you have to treat with greater priority. At your wish, we can go even further into architecture review, establishing rules for you, the tests strategy and so forth.However, launching a software project on good premises seems to be a pretty big phase against agile philosophy where you try to keep the Sprint 0 shorter or equal to the standard sprint size. Here some insights: preparing a continuous integration environment takes from 1 to 5 days, deploy other management tools like for planning, requirements management, quality centers, collaboration tools… again between 1 to 5 days where engineers with different profiles must intervene.. Worst of all is that these tools evolve fast, and you should try to use well tested technology on your projects. How to keep track of all that knowing you have to work on your projects? We are continually doing it by collecting an important amount of data from real projects, so you can benefit when we are building together the basis of your projects. Inside Pentalog it is called Production Fabric. We are able to deploy them fast and easy in our private cloud environment and in less than 1 day we will also configure them, so that it will completely fit your needs. All this is being apart of Manufacturing Framework.Now let’s look on a representative survey regarding the project preparation phase:

Time_To_Initiate_An_Agile_Project-01-011-1024x576Why representative? Because none of the companies I’ve came into contact with is doing less than 2 weeks for this phase.With us, you can do it in 1 week. Is that fast enough for you?To ensure that the organization complies with what you have already defined and adapts it progressively and continually so that you can deliver more business value to your clients, the 4th framework should apply: Continuous improvement. During this phase we integrate a minimum set of practices and tools into your development process and a series of events so that improvements occur. By events we understand from knowledge sharing events to audits. We show you how to do it or we can do it for you. Now you are on the runway, as before, just that this time you know you are on the right one, you benefit from the experience of hundreds of projects and your are between 2-4 times more efficient than before.Want to see how fast you can get?


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