About Agility

At OutSystems, we love our product. We honestly believe that it is something that truly makes the lives of IT people better. Which, in turn, has made our customers more successful. We've seen it work over and over and we try and tell everyone we can about it, but it sometimes sounds too good to be true. However, the word is spreading among the developers and we're seeing more and more people try it out for themselves.  
And we love that.

What we love even more is when we hear from you, our customers, about how much you love the Agile Platform too. This note is from one such customer who I was emailing with about being a reference for an upcoming press launch - and I just feel compelled to share it.

"I live and breathe OutSystems.

I love it... I wish I had discovered OutSystems years ago...

Let me give you a little background...

I was in the midst of creating the current application we are working on (in a competing tool,) when it came across my desk that I needed to create another system for our new online school that's scheduled to open in the Fall. Well, I needed to make this one happen fast, and it would have taken far too long to create in the existing tool.  So, I started searching the web for a faster way. I downloaded and tried two other products before I found OutSystems - both were completely unsatisfactory. They did not give me full control. Then, after probably another month, I stumbled across the OutSystems web page, and I'm very happy to have found it. With the Agile Platform I get complete control over the application, and can see and work with the code visually.  I was able to create a live application for the online school in no time.  The Agile Platform is so good that after creating the application for the online school, I wanted to scrap my current application for our brick and mortar schools and immediately started development for our brick and mortar application on the OutSystems platform.  The speed and ease of programming is what it's all about.

So, I am glad to tell anyone about OutSystems. I think its a great company, great people, great platform.

Thanks
Dan
Dan Stueck, vice president of IT for Faith Educational Ministries.

If you don't believe us - believe Dan. We think the Agile Platform is truly a better way to build, change and manage your web business applications. 

OK, getting off my soapbox now and on with the day ;)

Have you used the Agile Platform? What do you think of it?

With Rat Catcher deployed in public Beta, it was now time for Justin James to start gathering user feedback on his application. To do this, Justin installed and configured OutSystems' Embedded Change Technology (ECT.) You can read about his experience in his latest diary entry in Tech Republic.

I just read Justin James' most recent diary entries #4 & #5, where he continues to develop his Rat Catcher web application; his next challenge - to integrate custom code, he'd already developed, into the Agile Platform. As Justin said, "I was not worried -- after all, I knew that Integration Studio would let me hook up my application to this code."

I thought I'd share some key learnings and highlights from these two journal entries.
(BTW, If you missed the previous entries of Justin's diary check this previous post on the About Agility blog.)

A few weeks back, we introduced you to a Social Consulting Experiment that we were conducting with Forrester Research's John Rymer. We launched a new web page and invited anyone who wanted to submit a question for Rymer on the topic of "The Future of Enterprise Applications." We called it an "experiment" because, when we launched it we weren't sure how it would turn out - we didn't know how many people would submit questions, or what the response would be on sites like Twitter.

Fast forward a couple weeks, and we're happy to report that our Social Consulting Experiment was a mega-success! More than 60 people submitted questions, proving that there is a lot we need to sort out with regard to the future of enterprise applications, and dozens upon dozens of folks chimed in via Twitter using the #AskRymer hashtag.

John Rymer has sorted through all of the questions we received, and he selected the nine he thought best spoke to the future of enterprise applications. We caught up with him during the Forrester IT Forum and got his responses on video. Here is a recap of the questions Rymer answered:

• What will be the impact of fully web-enabled mobile devices and touch-devices on Enterprise application development?
• How prevalent do you see the use of BPM and ETL tools as opposed to corporations utilizing in-house developed processes to integrate applications or services for SOA? Where do you see the market trend headed in today's economy?
• How do we deal with our existing application portfolio?
• What percentage of future apps will be developed using agile technologies? Applicability of Agile to large scale enterprise apps?
• Will Enterprise Applications be hosted in the Cloud or on premise - what's the selection criteria? What's next after the Cloud?
• Will the next generation of Enterprise apps (both built and bought) be disposable?
• Do you think Enterprise Applications will work like internal social networks for companies?
• What are the key upcoming innovations that will change the face of enterprise applications?
• Will agile organizations with agile tool kits be able to surpass COTS vendors in delivering on-target business applications?

To see his answers to these questions, check out this page. We're excited to have had an opportunity to facilitate this conversation on the future of enterprise applications, and hope you've found it useful as well.

Let's continue the conversation about the future of enterprise applications here on this blog. What do you think? Do you have any lingering questions that we weren't able to answer during this experiment?

It's a known fact: R&D engineers are part of a special breed of IT professional who usually live behind closed doors, in a high-security area of the software vendor's ivory tower.

This means information about what's needed in their products comes from marketing folks and nagging sales reps (yikes!) and the feedback is usually shielded behind an online form that "takes only 2 minutes to fill."

This is all wrong!

Opening up the communication channel between R&D and the rest of the world is the best way to find out what users really need, understand how they are using the products you build and what they think is missing.
 
The problem with an open communication channel is that it also needs to be manageable. Setting up an email account where users can send in their suggestions is a recipe for email flooding; it will require massive manual work to get all feedback and ideas into a workable wish list; it's difficult to provide feedback, and will probably become unmanageable very quickly. So, how do you solve this problem?

Give a warm welcome to crowdsourcing!

The concept is simple; let a community of professionals interact, share their thoughts, vote and comment on other people's ideas. As participation grows, bad ideas will be filtered out, good ideas will bubbled to the top and a lot of great feedback on what's working (or not working) will become crystal clear. The ways this idea actually work have been published in James Surowiecki's best-selling book Wisdom of the Crowds.

This concept led us, at OutSystems, to create a Wisdom of the Crowds application; one that we could use to trigger, nurture and manage this creative process. We built the first version in just 5 days using the Agile Platform, and started using it internally to gather feedback and ideas from our own employees.

We added some functionality, tuned the usability a bit, solved some minor bugs... and then made it available to our user community. Every community member can now add their own ideas, comment on other user ideas or simply vote on the ideas that they find more valuable.

Here's what we achieved in the first two weeks:

388 users have contributed 189 ideas with 537 comments and 1719 "likes" (votes) by the community. Ten ideas have already been implemented and have been made available in the latest version of the Agile Platform. Thirteen ideas are set for implementation in the next release.

During the time it took to write this post the idea count rose to 216, with three additional ideas implemented and sixteen more coming soon!

If you're a member of the OutSystems community, you can access the Wisdom of Crowds here and participate in the online brainstorm.


PS: This app is free, and can be deployed on any Agile Platform installation (including the free Community Edition). If you'd like to use the Wisdom of Crowds app in your company contact us and we'll give you the pointers on how to set it up.

Image credit:Hideyoshi algn

There's no better way to try technology out than to build a real-life application with it. Taking an idea for a product and developing it is a great way to understand the value and shortcomings of any new tool.

This is exactly what Justin James decided to do with the Agile Platform and he's journaling his experience of developing his new web app, Rat Catcher, in a series of diary entries that are being published in Tech Republic. You can check out his first set of entries: Diary #1, Diary #2.

The following is an excerpt from Justin's latest experience using the Agile Platform in Diary #3 where he starts by saying:

"The Agile Platform is composed of four major pieces: Service Studio, Integration Studio, Service Center, and the Agile Network. I spend nearly all of my time in Service Studio, which is where the application and data modeling occur, as well as application debugging. You can also publish your application to a server from Service Studio. While Service Studio is an IDE, it uses a paradigm that is very different from any IDE that I have ever used.  The three major functions in Service Studio are data modeling, process modeling, and screen design."

He goes on to describe his first reactions, some of the difficulties he encountered, and how he managed to change his developer's paradigm to really make the most of the Agile Platform. Although a bit technical for some of our business minded readers, I think our developer base will find these articles very interesting.

I'll be curious to see what Justin thinks of version 5.1's new functionality (watch this space for more info on this upcoming release!) For example, the new wizards that will help build the screens from the data model even faster. Justin also hits on an advanced detail when he talks about the "late load" AJAX component, which admittedly was a bit of an odd pattern, and something our developers have fixed in 5.1.

So, this goes out to all of you professional developers; please share your experiences and tell other readers what you like and don't about working with the Agile Platform.  What do you think of Justin's take on the platform? Does it match your initial experiences?
 
Mike
(Follow me on twitter here)

There has been a flurry of activity in the OutSystems offices as we've been setting up new web pages for an experiment we're conducting with Forrester Research's John Rymer. It's a kind of social consulting experiment if you like - where OutSystems is sponsoring some consulting time with John, and inviting anyone (via Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) in the IT world to ask him questions on the topic of  "The Future of Enterprise Applications."

The idea is simple:
 
1) Post your question. You can post as many questions as you like on the subject - or sub-topics like cloud, mobility, tools, agile... (and don't forget to retweet it and follow the hashtag #AskRymer)

2) John will select up to 10 questions to answer, and we will meet with him next week during the Forrester IT Forum in Las Vegas to record his answers for you. (BTW, if you're attending IT Forum, stop by the OutSystems booth and say Hi!)

3) We will post the videos of his answers to the project webpage (and here, no doubt) and then tweet, blog, shout, and jump up and down to tell everyone they're ready!

Both John and the OutSystems gang are very excited to see how this experiment works out. We believe that the online IT community is very vibrant and sure to come up with thought-provoking questions!

So - what questions do you want to ask John Rymer about the Future of Enterprise Apps? Ask him now. 

Earlier this week InfoWorld delivered its findings after reviewing multiple web development tools.  They looked across five key areas to compile the score; Ease of Development, Extensibility, Portability, Documentation and Value.  The products reviewed were Alpha Five Version 10, Iron Speed Designer 6.2.1, Visual LANSA for the Web 11.5, OutSystems Agile Platform 5.0, and MLstate OPA S2 Beta.

Needless to say I was very happy (but not really surprised) to see that the Agile Platform's Service Studio performed top of class.

Now, if we can just get InfoWorld to do a review of the full life cycle aspect of delivering and maintaining a web application - that would change the landscape of the review considerably and I know we would rock again. 

Everyone who is a fan of the Agile Platform please take a minute to go and share your experience with the InfoWorld readers!