As promised, the customer, partner and OutSystems presentations that were given at the NextStep '09 conference are now available online.
These include great case studies on Agile development, Agile technical tips and tricks, and discussions on the future of agile, adoption and business value.
Also, if you have not yet completed the Agile Adoption Survey - it only takes 2 minutes and we would greatly appreciate your input!
You can check out the conference slide show with lots of photos that give a good sense of all that happened at last week's event!
Next, we want to hear from YOU! Tell us what you thought of the conference in the comments below. As we pull our notes together and start thinking about NextStep 2010 - we would love to hear from you.
The last session of track 1 was presented by OutSystems Partner Normatica, represented by Alexandre Mano, and OutSystems Customer Dr. Marcelo Mendonça de Carvalho of Gabinete do Secretário de Estado Adjunto da Administração Local.
Alexandre introduced the RJUE Project (Regime Jurídico da Urbanização e Edificação) and gave the floor to Dr. Marcelo de Carvalho who started his presentation by explaining the new legislation and the Simplex program that prompted the creation of the new municipal portal. The simplification of the legislation and the bet on new technologies that the Portuguese government is undertaking led DGAL - Direcção Geral das Autarquias Locais to build a Project in two phases.
Dr Marcelo de Carvalho explained that the first phase of the Project, which automated the process from the perspective of the Town Halls, has been in production for some time in www.portalautarquico.pt and has already virtualized over 900 processes. The new phase of RJUE has just gone live and is going to automate the end-to-end process for people requesting construction permissions.
Focusing on the Agile practices, Dr Marcelo de Carvalho called the audience's attention to the importance of using sprints in order to ensure visibility over what is being delivered and adjusting the prioritization of the new features to be implemented.
Alexandre Mano closed the presentation by reiterating the importance of the OutSystems Agile Platform and Methodology in the Project and expressed his eagerness to continue to promote new projects using this approach.
First, she described the The EPF Agile Kernel - they asked "what is the minimum aspects of a process that make a method Agile?"...and came up with the idea of a Kernel which is the smallest process that you can have. Each agile-related method was broken up into small practices (from whichever method - SCRUM, XP etc) that can then be pulled together and have been made available in the EPF library.Hugo Sousa, IT Director of Turismo de Portugal, started out by sharing with the audience his commitment to the business goals of Turismo de Portugal. For that, he showed us his project goals:
This is a very important change in IT, where usually the metrics are measured in bandwidth and server uptime!
Hugo pointed out that to do this IT Governance was a must. But because the rules can change and need to be adapted, Hugo stated that what he really needed was Agile IT Governance. After looking at several pre-packaged solutions, Turismo de Portugal picked OutSystems because it was the technology that could provide the necessary flexibility to implement IT rules in a simple and agile way.
By using OutSystems technology and implementing with INOV a centralized help desk system, Turismo de Portugal not only surpassed the 90% satisfaction mark, but was also able to gather data on the submitted incidents and have real time visibility on SLAs and satisfaction status.
Hugo highlighted 3 reasons why Turismo de Portugal picked OutSystems:
Turismo de Portugal plans to continue using OutSystems to expand their solution to support change management and financial management, and also other important projects not only related to Service-Desk (ITIL).
Eric ten Harkel, founder and manager of COOLProfs, started this really insightful and humorous look at some provocative reasons a company shouldn't use Model Driven Development:
With over 23 years of model based development using Agile-like methods, Eric took a look at how the industry has evolved and outlined his thoughts on opportunties for improvement. He discussed the outsourcing movement, but stated that the value of Agile and the need for business alignment will kill this for all but the most commodity-based applications.
Eric pointed out that development takes too long and is too hard with current tools like Visual Studio. Although new tools will help the development time, he made the point that the tools in themselves are useless without proper methodology. An answer to this was DSDM. This enabled doing the project in an iterative way, paving the way to Agile. Eric then talked about the psychology of Agile. He highlighted two main points that he believes make Agile successful:
The winning formula for Eric consists in balancing the methodology, the organization, and the tools. And Eric says that in the future COOLProfs will be using OutSystems as the tool!
The reasons that make Eric love OutSystems are the platform stability, the customer involvement, the ability of the platform to handle large volumes, the scrum meetings, the ability to change systems on the fly, and the amazing quality of its support.
Nuno Teles, Service Operations Director at OutSystems, launched the afternoon here at track 2 by talking about the challenges of scoping and sizing an Agile project. Agile projects are not based on lengthy specifications and piles of documents. Instead, they are focused on a clear business need and on understanding and designing the simplest effective solution to address it. The challenge consists of sizing a project based on fuzzy and high level requirements.
At this point Nuno did a demo of the OutSystems Agile Network, where he showed an entire project scoped in the web interface. To illustrate how scoping works, Nuno added a new story and some features to the project. When it came to sizing, everyone was amazed at how easily Nuno selected key parts of the story text and turned them into planned action items.
According to Nuno, OutSystems uses a long proven sizing methodology, developed, refined, and revised over 3 years and more than 400 projects. The methodology process consists of gathering requirements, organizing them into modules and drilling them down just enough to get an accurate sizing with an acceptable risk. To ensure transparency and alignment, all steps are made in close cooperation with the customer.
Nuno also added that having customer participation from day one is also a great way to ensure the Agile Methodology kicks in. The collaborative discussions during the sizing process naturally flow into backlog and sprint management performed during the project. At this point he urged the audience to try the sizing tool for themselves, by registering for a free trial of the OutSystems Agile Network!
The project that Marteijn talked to us about during this session was to support the new Government regulation which demands that Suppliers will be responsible for the collection and validation of meter data of smart meters from 2009 and for traditional meters from 2010. He shared a great deal of information about how E.ON developed their solution using Agile and working with OutSystems, SAP and other partners. 
To address the need for a responsive infrastructure and maintain low TCO - The Keep it Simple team are working with insurance companies to implement a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and build certain aspects of the systems as Dynamic Business Applications. They recommend to the insurance companies they work with (and which is probably applicable to the audience in other industries) the following:
Rosa told the audience how they decided to break up their complex environment into 3 layers - Front-end, Services and Core Systems. They used the Agile Platform to enable their channel portals for customers and brokers. This was supported by existing services in the SOA architecture. OutSystems' Agile Platform is also exposing reusable services to other applications in their environment.Track 2 started with a great presentation by Pedro Gama, Account Manager of Glintt. The presentation focused on how Glintt used the OutSystems platform to deliver a factoring solution to Finanfarma, a Portuguese Factoring society created by ANF. (If you want more information about factoring, the Wikipedia is a good place to start)
Pedro began by handing the mic to Fernando Malosso, responsible for the commercial area of Finanfarma. There's nothing better than having the client talking for you! Fernando did an introduction to the challenges and complexity of the factoring business, stating that IT agility was paramount. As Fernando put it "each case has its own nuances".
Pedro returned to the podium and explained the major challenges Glintt faced for this project:
Glintt ended up delivering a very sophisticated solution, totally implemented in OutSystems. The numbers speak for themselves: 12 applications, over 100 web screens, more that 150 database entities, and a lot of very complex business logic was implemented to support this solution.
According to Pedro, the project had an initial estimate of 3 years with 6 consultants, assuming the use of traditional technologies. By using the OutSystems Agile Platform, the project was done in 1 and a half years, with only 2 consultants! One key point that Pedro mention is that this was only possible because of Finanfarma's strong commitment!
For wrap-up, Pedro Gama mentioned that the use of the OutSystems Platform simplified the implementation of the complex business logic, provided a way to quickly respond to business changes, displayed good performance when dealing with large volumes of data, and addressed continuous change in a very efficient and cost effective way.
Mike Jones and Carlos Alves of OutSystems got the audience's brains thinking with a discussion on "Changing The economics of Application Development" with a set of questions:
"Can a company really innovate in today's economic environment?" - they think "yes", and gave examples of how new ideas are coming up from the business, they are small but they are making a significant difference to business success - however, they may need custom built software (not packages) due to the need for speed and flexibility.
*"Is it all doom and gloom?" *- the guys argued that NOW is the right time to innovate and get Agile. They challenged IT teams to be ready for whatever comes next with the economy -and suggested that the only way for the Audience and their businesses to not only survive but thrive, is to get more Agile.
"WTBWITD?" - Mike joked with the audience that this wasn't really easy to pronounce and needed some marketing spin - but "What The Business Wants IT Delivers" Carlos said, is the essence of Agile which is basically "a systematic approach to accommodate innovation"
"What is Lean?" - the process to making sure IT delivers what the business needs - Agile is the secret to becoming Lean.
"What is Agile and how is OutSystems different?" -Industry agile projects: iterative development with 4-6 week sprints, continuous business participation and deliver vertically integrated solutions at the end of each sprint.
-The OutSystems Agile Approach: able to pre-size the project with high accuracy; time-box principle, smaller up-front analysis and more prototyping; 2 week sprints that deliver vertically integrated solutions at the end of EACH DAY. Leverage SCRUM practices.
A great question came from the audience about how to become MORE agile when your team is on the other side of the world and difficult to reach - they are doing 3 month sprints...which is not Agile, its waterfall.
Answers from the OutSystems team: The first issue is likely to be the lack of commitment from the business side to attend the regular weekly sprints. The second is that they need to have a business sponsor with authority who attends the regular sprints. Final suggestion - to ensure that an Engagement manager is local to the business-team, and that the Delivery Manager and the Engagement Manager are in constant communication.
Wrapping up, Mike and Carlos challenged the audience on "What role will you play in today's economy? You have two choices: put your head in your hands and hope it all goes away or take the opportunity to embrace change and innovate."
Wise words that we can probably apply to all our lives in these uncertain times.
Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems, kicked off the conference with a thought provoking keynote arguing the idea that ‘IT doesn’t matter’ and is just a commodity was incorrect and described how and why IT is in fact the source of competitive advantage for many leading companies. He also warned the audience that because every good idea is eventually copied -eroding any competitive advantage - continuous innovation is imperative.
He cited several interesting examples of companies using their IT systems to create distinct competitive advantage: a mass retail company using IT to develop customer intimacy; an Insurance company decentralizing 98% of its business transactions through their IT systems - resulting in fully empowered agents, and in turn attracting the best agents in the market; and he introduced Main Energie, the next keynote which we will also be blogging on…who is the epitome of a company using IT for competitive advantage.
At this point, Paulo turned to 4 industry trends which he believes will reinforce the notion of IT as a source of competitive advantage and which are key to the OutSystems go-forward vision and strategy.
I’m pretty certain this will take a white-paper to describe - but here are some highlights…
#1 - the acceleration of Agile adoption: citing many examples of the Agile adoption ramp in the market, defining “Agile” and addressing the common “Agile is OK, but not for me” statement. An interesting discussion here on the difference between 1. software product organizations with established budgets, product managers, stable teams and planned design - who are doing well with Agile, and 2.Enterprise IT organizations with limited budgets, business users, shifting teams and unpredictable requirements. Paulo described how the OutSystems approach to Agile has been developed around the very different needs of Enterprise IT and how to make Agile practical in their environment - resulting in WTBWIWID (What The Business Wants Is What IT Delivers)
#2 - the rise of Business-savvy IT and IT-savvy Business users: Paulo described how a new generation of tech savvy business people are now forcing IT to become more business savvy and driving a trend toward new roles in the IT App Dev world…which Agile is further consolidating. This trend is being addressed at OutSystems through the Agile Academy and Agile training & certifications.
#3 - the world is flat (and getting flatter everyday): Paulo gave us an example of a customer who has development teams spread around the globe and looking to expand the team to the Asia. Probably a more and more common scenario. This flattening demands a different type of approach to Agile and different technology enablers. Here Paulo hinted at the Cloud and how that would figure into OutSystems’ upcoming releases of its Agile Platform.
#4 - the Process-driven Enterprise: the fourth and probably most significant trend, Paulo said is not a trend, but a reality. Enterprises have to address how business process fits into their IT strategy and he told us about how OutSystems has been working with its largest process-centric customers for the last 18 months to figure out the best way to help address process within the context of Agile. Here Paulo indicated that the upcoming releases of the Agile Platform are likely to tackle some of the key challenges of traditional BPM (i.e. big-bang approach with large upfront investments, and the disconnect between process & applications which prevents rapid adaptation to change.)
There you have it - 4 trends that are supporting how IT can be a source of competitive advantage…and the audience all seemed to agree with all the vigorous nodding of heads!
Lisbon is beautiful and sunny - and 257 (and counting) registrants just streamed into the CCB auditorium for the first keynote presentation of the OutSystems NextStep ‘09 conference!! It really is shaping up to be a huge Agile event!
More very soon…
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