Enterprise Release Model - At the heart of this large business operations sits a diverse set of moderate to tightly coupled large scale systems. This includes IVR, CRM, billing, provisioning, and online applications amongst others, at a rough count the overall solution contained around forty core applications. Demands that the pace of change increate and that the cost of delivery reduce led to a campaign to transform how development was done and move it to an industrialised process. A change was made from a project oriented model to a consolidated coordinated model that secured and allocated capacity from the application development team. Coordinated waves of development, ultimately delivering releases where prioritised and driven through the release cycle by a core delivery leadership team. We provided primary input into the model and then operated as part of the delivery leadership team during the formative year and a half as the approach bedded in.

Delivery & Agile Adoption Review - The global CIO of this large financial service company need to understand why there was perception of a major imbalance between what development cost and what it delivered. There were also questions around the “move to Agile” the organisation had made. We undertook a review that clarified the state of play within the organisation covering both the overall delivery approach and how appropriate the way agile practices had been adopted was. It became clear that the organisation had remained very project centric and needed to industrialise to achieve greater value, throughput, speed and transparency.

Software Product Development Process - This produce development company need to revitalise the delivery of a core product whilst at the same time developing a strategic replacement and introducing a more modern approach to development. The existing setup had suffered from quality and throughput issues. A senior executive took over the area and we were engaged to assist across a variety of disciplines. One was the shaping of the development and delivery model. Once you move from a waterfall project centric approach this becomes a non-trivial process. We shaped a hybrid delivery model using sprint based development with periodic cuts taken for finalisation and release. An aligned testing model used embedded in-sprint exploratory testing alongside sprint plus feature and quality of function testing with separate formal product testing associated with the releasable cuts. This model got the balance right, quality improved and development of the strategic product accelerated.

Software Development Practice - This satellite operation of a major defense contractor needed a software development practice. The contactor had acquired a small niche supplier wanting to sell their technology into its military customer base, but to do so it needed a acceptable practices. The parent organisation’s existing practices were too heavyweight, designed to delivery complex primary sensor solutions used on warships. Something else was needed. A lightweight, small team, development practice was defined that balanced the transparency, traceability and control against flexibility and cost of operation. The definition employed principles and policies overlaid with a tracking and assessment framework rather than prescription of what was to be done. This was a different approach to defining the software practices within the organisation. Rather than dictate how to do things it spelt out what needed to be achieved and then had mechanisms to judge the level of achievement. The local team retained flexibility whilst the parent company established an appropriate level of discipline.

Hybrid Development Practice Code Management Process - Having agreed a hybrid delivery model, combining sprint based development with periodic releases of the product, we then defined the code management practices that supported this model. Encompassing branching, merging practices, promotion rules and change flow the approach provide identified effective patterns covering new development, standard changes and fixes, support for system and integration testing and emergency support.