OSEF - Delivering Software Faster

Yesterday was the 6th event of the year.  We had a great pannel!

Adrian Cho, Development Manager, Rational Team Concert at IBM 
(see his work at http://www.jazzproces...)

Jason Mawdsley, Director of Project Management and Certified Scrum Master at Macadamian 
(see his blog http://ontherighttrac...)

John Fait, Lead Software Developer, Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe

We looked at ways that you can use in your oganization to "Deliver Software Faster".  Interrestingly enough, the discussion kept being steered towards Agile methods, Scrum in particular - probably a sign of our time! 

In the end Scrum has not - as is - been identified as the silver bullet though, but instead, an custom version that fits your organization might very well be YOUR silver bullet. 

An interresting shift that happenned early in the discussion consisted of focusing not on "Delivering Software Faster" but more "Delivering Value Faster".   

With no surprise, this consists of putting the user of the product as a key component in the product evolution, a couple methodologies were discussed:

• User Centered Design Methodology
• SyncDev

Last but not least, people.  It's only with a great team that you will accomplish great things.  Make sure that:

1. your hiring process allows you to get the best out there,
2. your people are doing things they like,
3. they are well trained.  

But first and foremost, have inspiring leaders that will help them to be self motivated at achieving theirs and your organization goals. 

Micro Deliverables

The Tech Republic had an interresting post earlier this month:  Monitor Project Progress by using micro-deliverables.

This is a lesson we made almost two years ago.  Being mostly software centric, we refer to this as the "patch a day principle".   We even push it further than the author of the post by targetting deliverables on a "almost daily basis".

1. Amongst developers, the code is an awesome communiation tools.  
   
2. You cannot catch an error much sooner than the next day it is commited.
3. In distributed contexts, the time zones often plays in your advantages and review happens over nights. 

As you can see by the name of the "principle" this is something very software engineering centric.   There is no reason to not apply this accross all roles involved in a project though: Documentation, QA and UX. 

This is about predictability and this is a requirement common to all activities on a project.   Make your project lead and your customer happy through a predictable team using frequent micro-deliverables!