These days, most businesses have a significant software component to growing their business, innovation and driving costs down.
Software represents a difficult project for many firms to get right. Some firms keep their software development projects secret and bring projects to market only to discover that they have over-invested in features their customers and users don’t use or need. In fact, the success rate of such software projects runs in the 15% range. In contrast, a more agile or scrum approach pushes the success rate up to close to 50%.
Scrum is easily done wrong. Interference by engineering managers. Poor architecture. Failure to motivate developers. All are potential scrum development problems. Coaching and influencing the organization is something we do to make your software development more successful.
Some guidelines:
- Scrum is about “sustainable development”, in other words allowing developers to develop software for years rather than burning them out with long work hours.
- Great software continues to pay off for years. Bad software create “technical debt” or bad programming that slows down future development work.
- Architecture matters: there are two kinds of architecture. The architecture a team develops and an architecture within which the team operates. It’s important not to get the two confused.
- Scrum is about improvement. If your processes, are not being reviewed regularly, then it is no surprise that your software processes may not be improving.
- Test driven development or TDD means that good software includes the tests for evaluating the software. This approach is different than throwing software over the wall at the last minute to software testers.
- Customer input is key. In any software project, it’s almost impossible to obtain too much customer input during the process.