April 2010 Archives

Over at eBizQ, you'll find a newly penned article by OutSystems senior consultant
Robert Neri on the topic of Agile SOA, specifically looking at how organizations can create a nimble IT structure by introducing Agile technologies and strategies as part of their SOA development methodologies. It's an interesting look at how Agile and SOA can come together to create a 'best of both worlds' scenario and create effective results.

Find Robert's article on eBizQ, "Agile SOA: Mad Science or Solid Reality?" online here. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the article and the broader concept of Agile SOA, so let us know via the comments.

And if you're looking for more information on Agile SOA, check out our whitepaper on leveraging SOA investments using Agile methodologies. 

Now that the dust has settled (sorry, no volcano-pun intended) on NextStep 2010, we wanted to thank everyone for making it such a great event!

Thanks to all the speakers for sharing their experience of using Agile methodologies and the Agile Platform in their organizations: our customers, partners, OutSystems team and our special guests.  To all who attended and participated in the breakfast roundtables, the CIO roundtable and sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to our sponsors and partners for supporting the OutSystems community.

We're excited to say the final tally of event participants was 437 - a great turn out!  ...in fact I think many of you are in this slideshow. Check it out!!

The final customer case study of the day, but certainly not the least, was presented by Rui Ribeiro, of Estradas de Portugal. This organization works to fund, maintain, plan and extend the road system throughout Portugal as a public service, and Rui talked about the importance of IT in supporting the changes that the company is undergoing.

Their challenge: being an 80-year-old state-owned company that's changing its management paradigm, changing its very business model - because the company needed to find new revenue streams. In order to become more sustainable, they needed to better and more directly address their end-user - the road users. They need to know who their customers are, where are they going, and what do they need from the Portuguese road system. From an IT perspective they needed to have business information online and to interface directly with their business partners.

To this end, they created a Portugal Traffic site for customers, with real-time access to data about traffic in Portugal, and they are implementing features to communicate directly with their users - using SMS, e-mail, a laptop widget, and others mechanisms. All of this is helping the organization change its image from one of a traditional public organization to a modern and competitive one.

Why choose OutSystems? In 2009 they were faced with a huge set of IS issues the first of which was their agility - fundamentally, their ability to adapt to the needs of their new business model quickly. As well as huge number of applications, little integration and silos; the IT team was focused on internal applications which were not web enabled, but unproductive windows and legacy forms. In addition, and probably hardest to change, their internal users saw them as a cost center and not a partner. Rui and team needed to change this viewpoint and be considered as a strategic part of the business.

To do this, they went about choosing a set of preferred technologies and partners and defined a set of architectural stacks to enable this goal. They HAD to do this in order to achieve their future goals and most importantly, they needed to be FAST. This is where OutSystems came in; other organizations like Brisa (another OutSystems client) or Ascendi had already done it, and Estradas de Portugal was behind and needed to move faster and get more competitive.

They started using the OutSystems Agile Platform to leverage their IT business knowledge and build and deliver new web systems rapidly.  Another by-product of adopting OutSystems was that it helped them get closer to their users - yes, the introduction of a new methodology (Agile) enabled them to "break the ice" with the internal customers, delivering value and quickly.

Results after the first year: today they have a huge set of projects running on OutSystems. Financial applications: budgeting, commitment management, payment processing and financial dashboards. Also running on OutSystems; an identity management system, inventory management systems and systems for managing road security.

Rui described their biggest OutSystems implementation to date in a little more detail- a financial and supplier management system. They originally had the Oracle eBusiness Suite in place but suffered the typical issues of a packaged application. So, they chose to build a ring of services around it to support their specific needs and used OutSystems to build a set of applications (budgeting, commitment, payment) - with a sprint/demo every 2 weeks. On Jan 4th of 2010, this portion of the application was released.  The next phase is to extend the application with the goal of communicating more openly and accurately with their suppliers (e.g. supplier request, contracts and evaluations,) and hopefully remove all the phone calls that are currently needed.

Achieving strategic goals: today the Estradas de Portugal IT team is making progress toward their goal of no longer being seen as a cost center - but rather becoming a strategic part of the company.  The applications they have and continue to implement - and in particular, the speed at which they are making change - are making a difference to the way they service their customers and, as a result, the overall perception of the company.

Francisco Menezes, responsible for the Application IT at OutSystems, started by mentioning that OutSystems web applications are all built with the Agile Platform. Over the years, this set of applications got rather large, and refactoring become a challenge.

Pedro Barreto, from Bacardi Martini Portugal, stepped down from his IT Manager position and took over a truly honest and open stance, sharing his personal experiences with agile methodologies and OutSystems.

He started by quickly reviewing his past (and bad) experiences with Waterfall models, purchased packages and several failed custom built projects. He knew that had to be a better way, and was looking for something new, something fresh, that would allow Bacardi's IT to reach the desired level of responsiveness and agility.
 

About 2 years ago, when Pedro joined Bacardi, he found a CRM project waiting for him - the company wanted to replace an existing solution that had not been adopted by the sales team.  After looking at existing packages (some of which being used in other Bacardi subsidiaries) he quickly understood that those packages would have the right mix of functionality to effectively support the local business and, worse than that, would not be adopted by sales causing the CRM project to fail again.

Looking back, Pedro considers such a big project to have been a bad choice due to its complexity and track-record. There were high expectations from IT, but on the business side the expectations were really low due to IT's bad reputation ("CRM projects fail all the time".)

As the project evolved, major features were being decided and elaborated during the development phase. Business was not fast enough to test new functionality and deliver requirements for each sprint - development teams were stalled!

To make things worse, a new Sales director was brought on board, and the project was put on hold, 6 months after it was started!

This could have been a disastrous u-turn, but fortunately, the new sales director's energy and vision brought the missing ingredients to the mix. Sprint demos got more participants, more feedback and major features got discussed and detailed.

What were the results? One week after the official roll-out, all features were ready and being used! Today, 60 users from 4 departments are using it (literally) around the clock.

They took 6 months in the first phase, then shifted the focus and in just 3 months, delivered the final solution. "If it wasn't for the ability to change provided by the Agile Platform, we would have never pulled this one off!" Pedro concluded.

An interesting fact was that, while the CRM system was being implemented, they managed to deliver 3 more solutions even if no budget was available:

• A Logistics Handling Control to replace a complex XL based process was built in 1 week with 1 developer;
• An IT portal (with a Knowledge Base, Helpdesk ticketing system, Change Management, Backup Control and News) was delivered in 4 months by 1 developer, on his free time;
• A Document Management System (for which there was not IT budget available) was quickly prototyped, shown to the business, and is currently being finalized.
  

The key learning for Pedro is that "as the business starts to understand that IT is able to deliver, they get more involved".

Here's Pedro's tips & tricks to engage the business:

• Correct small bugs or misbehavior during demos: while the problem is being discussed during the demo, have a developer implement that small change and immediately show it to the user. You'll get an instant gratification and WOW effect!
• Spoil key users by promptly delivering on their small requests, even if they're not fully on scope (to some extent obviously!)
• Attract other users by showing-off what their peers have gotten from IT.
  

Last but not least, if you want to instill an effective agile practice in your enterprise:

• Star with small projects;
• No one will believe you at first;
• No one will have enough time for it;
• Don't quit! You believe in it, so reallocate development efforts while waiting for the business to react;
• Deliver fast and frequently;
• Get users to see the work being delivered;
  

Rui Afonso of Hyfas spoke about the key success factors of introducing and succeeding with Agile projects in small and mid-size companies. In comparison, Rui reviewed the distinct challenges presented to these corporations:

Kicking off the after-lunch slot the, now stranded, COOLProfs team of Ton Koot and Joop Stringer from Holland started things off with a bang. COOLProfs is an OutSystems partner specializing in application development and CA Gen. They talked to us about how to execute an Agile project on-time and on-budget. They shared their experience of their first two Agile projects and used two customer examples to show how things can go; both a project that goes well and as expected, and one that does not.

The first project they discussed was with Schuitema, a new client - the Dutch retailer with 400 stores that each had a server with their own retail system. The project was to use the Agile Platform to add a new web-based mobile front-end to a legacy system that had was built with CA-Gen and make available the existing inventory management system on Motorola PDAs (with a Motorola web browser that did not support AJAX) to the store managers and enable real-time inventory control. The intended application was to be a small one, estimated at approximately 700 Software Units.

The second project was for TNT (global transportation & mail shipment,) an existing client of COOLProfs - to build a new, stand-alone support-request system to enable users to register issues and establish a knowledgebase. Their sponsor was from the business-side and worked with COOLProfs directly to build the new system using the OutSystems Agile Platform. A larger application, this was expected to be a 40,000 SU system.

Ton and Joop entertained the audience with two videos. One of an athlete hurdling with great easy and agility. The other, of "Total Wipeout" which is, for those who don't know, a TV show with a lot of different groups competing in a crazy obstacle course - and crashing around with less than agility or grace! 


Can you guess which video represented the final experience of which project?

Their experience was that in Schuitema case, they expected easy and speed of a project but faced many surprises and great difficulty; with the TNT project - they expected a harder time with this new customer; but everything went extremely smoothly.

So, what worked?

• Having the commitment of all stakeholders
• Having the business person as your key sponsor
• Direct interaction with the customer - so much so, they felt it was extremely important to be constantly on customer site.
• They strictly enforced all agile principles - daily stand-ups, change requests etc
• Applying common sense.

What didn't work and how to avoid the pitfalls?

• Never underestimate the complexity of a system
• Take a good look at the documentation to know in detail what you were working with
• Be careful of proprietary devices (the PDAs they had to use meant hand-coding and big headaches in maintenance)
• Having IT as the key-sponsors alone; get a direct line of communication with the business users
• Be wary of knowing the target technology environment
• Be careful when working with third parties who cannot keep pace with your rate of work and Agile practices.

How to Cope with Challenging Environments: First, the guys prefaced this next section with a warning not to end up back in the waterfall world by trying too hard to know everything up-front.

However, DO do the following:

• Start only after you fully understand and feel comfortable that external factors are under control
• Conduct proof of concept against the final architecture and technical environment
• Practice risk mitigation in general
• Convincing your customer that there is a trade-off between time, budget and functionality
• Convince your customer that their on-going participation and understanding is paramount. 

Their final key conclusions:

1. Size doesn't matter (the more successful and straightforward project was in fact the larger one by nearly 10x)
2. But, infrastructure does matter! (e.g. a different PDA was presented to the team to be used than the one used for the prototype)
3. Don't find yourself responsible for things you cannot control (like third parties or the support of handhelds)
4. Be wary of using new technology to change archaic organizations.

"Agile is key to overcome difficult customer environments"

José Luís Ferreira, Partner at Pessoas & Processos (P&P), took the audience through a voyage to Africa, and shared his adventures in delivering a custom Facilities Management System for Sonangol, the largest oil company in Angola.
 
Sonangol had just created a new division called DMI to manage a brand new building that would be used by several companies and divisions of the Sonangol group. What P&P found when they got there was a new division, with a new building to manage, with a new set of challenges every day, and with no past experience - from a IT project perspective, this meant dealing with an extremely fuzzy (not to say non-existing) and evolving scope.

José described Sonangol as a paper-based company - a very hard to change mentality. In fact, even after delivering the new Facilities Management System (called ANGELS), many employees still print out screens and reports for their daily processes and tasks!

The ANGELS system has so much functionality that is impossible to describe in this post. It includes Budget Management (including contracts and suppliers); Organization Management (for over 700 people at DMI); Asset Management (including equipment inventory); Work and Personnel Management.

In a country where the term Agile has not found its way into the business lingo yet, José went on to describe what he calls an Extreme Customer Environment:

• The customer is 6000Km away from P&P's office. It might not seem that far, but you need to realize that it takes 2 weeks to prepare a request for a Visa, and 2 more weeks to (eventually) get it. That's 4 weeks just to be able to get on a plane!
• Angola's capital, Luanda, is one of the most expensive cities for foreign business people. Having people stay there for long periods of time would blow away all the project's budget;
• Communications are a daily challenge. Being able to do something so trivial as a Skype call or sending a file via email is really a matter of luck. Too often it doesn't work!
• Finally, getting the hardware you need is a crusade! In one case it took them 15 days to get a computer (not a server in the data-center... a regular PC to use for development!)
  

So how did P&P use an agile approach in such adverse business conditions?

They had to dilute the time-line... instead of using the tradition 2-3 week sprints they decided to have 2 months sprints, for a project time-line of 1 year. "This is certainly no a candidate for an Agility Award project right?" José teased.

Surprisingly, enough, agility was the most important value, the one differentiation P&P had to rely on to ensure success:

• It allowed them to cope with undefined and constantly changing business requirements;
• Most questions emerged during demos, where they could get real end-user feedback;
• The project was time-boxed. They had to deliver the solution in a well defined time-frame;
• It provided a framework to continuously negotiate scope for every sprint, and ensure the solution was addressing the right business needs.
  

According to José, using the OutSystems Agile Platform was critical for the successful delivery of the project, because of its support for change and distributed development teams.

After every sprint demo, they immediately corrected all issues and implement the requested changes - they would only leave the country with the list of new features to be implemented in the next sprint... and start working on the new visa for the next trip in 2 months time!

Carlos Alves, from OutSystems, kicked-off Track 2 afternoon sessions by talking about Application Delivery in the cloud. He got the audience excited right from the start, by stating that a new product offering would be announced.

The close Track 1 morning sessions, Turismo de Portugal brought a success case of the innovative School Management Solution (SMS).

This was not the average case study presentation: it was a true celebration of success with agile!

Hugo Sousa, IT Director for Turismo de Portugal, shared the stage with other 4 project stakeholders,and started the session by playing a video that introduced Turismo de Portugal, their business and needs, sprinkled with live testimonials and images of the School Management Solution being used. You can check the video here.



Hugo explained they evaluated several packages available in the market (both commercial and open source). Their conclusion was that they would either be forced to buy a package that included too much functionality they didn't need or want; or buy a package that used relatively obsolete technology and would be very difficult (and costly) to adapt to their specific needs.

So, at the end of the day, they decided to build it from scratch. Many said they were crazy, but the team knew that building it was the right thing to do - and today they proved they really make the right decision.

The project involved 50 people, from several internal resources (both the Schools, and the Education, IT and Finance departments) and from two implementation partners (Normática and TrueWind).

Francisco Neto, from Normática, described the challenges they had: breaking away from manual and paper based processes and create a system to manage 16 schools, and be used by 1300 resources (including teachers and staff) and over 3000 students.

The main objectives? To create uniform processes that all schools would follow, to automate manual tasks to improve productivity and reduce lead times, and to optimize all processes during the whole analysis and implementation stages.

For the longer term, their vision is to increase the quality of educational services and the student's satisfaction levels, improve the tourism offers in Portugal, and increase de demand for tourism and hospitality education in the country - and all of this with a strong focus on the environment and sustainability.

Here are some stats about the project:

• An agile methodology was used, with 6 sprints of 3 weeks;

• They chose 3 week sprints to ensure a bigger throughput of functionality for each sprint demo;

• They created around 30 applications and components, with +500 web pages and 220 database tables;

• To accelerate the development, they reused 5 pre-built components including "Resources and Meetings Management", "Email Services" and "Charting".

João Fernandes (one of the School directors involved in the project) said that originally information was coming from several sources and in different formats. With the launch of a centralized and shared new School Management System, they immediately attained process alignment.

Also, by segregating users by pre-defined profiles, they improved access to the right information for each user, as well as security. According to João, the administrative, financial and pedagogical areas where the ones that most benefited from the launch of the new system but "there is still a lot of potential to explore in this system!" he added.

Maria João, another School Director, presented a couple of slides showing the differences between the processes in 2008/2009 and what they look like today: the key takeout is that everything that once was managed with paper, has now migrated to the new web-based application.

Not only paper and waste are gone, but the whole organization became more "productive" - today they actually handover some of the responsibilities to the students. For example, students are responsible for managing their information and submit their absences in self-service. Another great example is that students don't have to travel to the school they want to join for the enrollment process - they can do it in a school closer to them, saving time and money and simplifying the whole process.

To wrap the session, Hugo asked the audience if they remembered the chart that was presented during Paulo Rosado's keynote yesterday (the example of a company who delivered 10K function points in less than a year.)

"That was OUR chart. Those were OUR numbers. That represents all that we've accomplished" he said proudly. After thanking the entire team he added "We chose the right technology, and in only 4 months we were able to deliver all of this!"

The session ended with even more celebration as Mike Jones (VP of Marketing at OutSystems) handed two Agility Awards to Turismo de Portugal and Normática, for such an innovative and successful agile project.

Congratulations!

Hugo Matthioli of Reditus spoke this afternoon on OutSystems & SAP complementary solutions. He discussed the strengths of combining the two products and methodologies and how to combine them to extend base ERP functionality into the Intranet of RPA - Rui Pena, Arnaut & Associados, a leading Portuguese law firm. Reditus orchestrates the delivery through its custom development and SAP implementation businesses, offering powerful combined solutions to its customers.

First, he explained the challenge for RPA and his team: to deliver a rich intranet application to support document management and enterprise workflows in 4 months, by extending the existing SAP Financials, SCM and Human Capital Management implementation.

Next, Hugo explained how the solution was architected to provide the required degree of flexibility: the Agile Platform supporting the Portal layer, providing all user services integrated with SAP via Web Services. At the end, the solution integrated 13 SAP web services to support 17 custom business processes.

Additionally, Hugo explained how to integrate an custom development project using the Agile Platform with an SAP deployment and customization project: by  
embracing two tracks of development with OutSystems agile methods and SAP's ASAP methodology, iterating the user's interface and stand-alone modules using OutSystems, and focusing later down the road on the SAP integration. That gives the team the required time to bring together the user interface with data integration.

Professor Miguel Mira da Silva of INOV and his PhD student, Carlos Mendes, joined us for the second of our morning sessions. INOV is an OutSystems partner and a non-for-profit innovation institute focused on IT, networks and electronics. INOV includes an IT Governance group and a Software Development group that delivers custom web business applications based on OutSystems methodology and technology.

They presented their research on managing software maintenance with ITIL and Agile. First, Miguel talked about how, we in IT, tend to focus on just one of the three aspects of Information Systems - technology - but we forget to manage organizations and people that need to be managed. So, he challenged the audience to consider all three aspects: technology, organizations and management. Miguel asserted that Management is what can really make the difference to success - because people, and the technology they use, are relatively difficult to change.

Since maintenance represents 60-80% of software cost - this is what they decide to focus their research on, but (especially in relation to Agile,) we must remember that maintenance has no scope, no budget and no fixed time frame.

THE RESEARCH QUESTION:  Miguel asked his research team (represented at NextStep by Carlos): while they know how successful they can be using OutSystems for systems development and management, they wanted to know how we could better manage the maintenance of OutSystems-built systems?

In broad terms, they found the answer to be to use the same method for managing an overall company (which are also Organizations + Technology + Management) to manage maintenance - and so they looked to ITIL first and made the assumption that Agile was not appropriate for maintenance (an assumption they worked to dis-prove in their research.)

Carlos explained that since ITIL is a set of concepts and practices for managing IT services, and that maintenance is a service - ITIL can be used to manage software maintenance. These concepts have been implemented in their Service Manager - a prototype application - which includes a service catalog for managing service lifecycles, Service Level Management to manage SLAs and indicators, and a Request Fulfillment component for managing the request lifecycle.

Service Manager has been piloted in several local Portuguese organizations including PrimeDrinks and Turismo de Portugal - and have achieved success in their pilots.  Hugo Sousa, CIO of Turismo de Portugal was very happy with the results, saying "With INOV we did in 4 months what others in 8 months couldn't. It's not about *ology. It's about the right orchestration. Always remember that a fool with a tool is always a fool."

FINDINGS: When it comes to maximizing the performance and predictability of the maintenance management process, the team concluded that Agile could be used for maintenance, but important differences need to be taken into account: that while development projects have scope, budget and time frames - maintenance does not. Miguel summarizes that their research and pilots have shown that while you should use Agile for development (and not maintenance) and ITIL for maintenance (and not development) - they can be combined into a single integrated management framework.

Miguel closed by offering to the audience that their work is openly available, and while they are an OutSystems Partner, their research results are available to anyone.

Gonçalo Borrêga, from OutSystems, started his session sharing his history with OutSystems BPT: For the last couple of years Gonçalo has been working on a very complex claim handling system, with 708 activities, 501 business rules, and more than 4 million process instances running! And these are processes that run from 2 minutes to more than 2 years!

Track 1 started with a great presentation by Sandra Fernandes, Project Manager of Glintt, that shared an interesting case study of a solution delivered to REN Trading (a large Portuguese utilities company, part of REN).

The main takeaway of the session was the very positive results Glintt reaped from using an Agile Methodology approach.

Sandra began by explaining REN's business, which is actually very complex - just like most Utilities companies I've come across! Let me try to summarize it: REN is responsible for managing a large array of processes from energy production to CO2 emission allowances.


For those not familiar with the energy market, keep in mind that energy cannot be stored, so you need to produce what will be consumed, and respond to any production/consumption change in real-time. On a daily basis, you need to collect data, aggregate it and make decisions in real time to ensure the success of your business. The impressive fact that struck the audience was that, before this system was delivered, REN managed most of their operations and calculations using a complex ecosystem of interlinked spreadsheets. Just take a minute to think how that might look like...

Sandra took some time to describe the final solution, giving the audience a feel of how the system actually works. When she explained all the functionality the system offers (which I'm keeping off this post to keep it short) and mentioned it was delivered in 16 weeks, you could see people wondering "how was this possible?"

Sandra quickly answered that question in the next slides: using an agile methodology and the OutSystems Agile Platform!

Some quick project stats:

• Go live in 14 weeks
• 5 sprints/demos + 1 tuning sprint of 2 weeks
• Glintt Team: 1 Engagement Manager, 1 Delivery Manager, 2 developers
• Customer team: 1 Sponsor, 1 Manager, 2 key users

Despite the complex project scope and the relatively small project teams (from both the customer and Glintt) and timeline, the project was delivered on-time, on budget and with strong user adoption!

Sandra wrapped up her presentation sharing what she considers to have been the key success factors:

• Strong commitment and early adoption of the agile methodology by the customer - Glintt actually ran a workshop session with the customer to get them up to speed on the agile methodology and engage them from day one;
• Continuous coaching and alignment of expectations - this ensured that as the project evolved, the customer was always aware of the "cost" required to implement features and perform changes.
• Early implementation of the most complex business processes - this got buy-in from the customer since they saw, very early in the project, how the main features would work and understood they were actually going to get what they wanted! It also reduced project risk.
• Agile Platform's ability to support continuous and fast change - starting with relatively fuzzy scope that is constantly being renegotiated and realigned, means you need to react to change very fast. According to Sandra, without the Agile Platform's support for change, it would have been impossible to deliver such level of change in such a short timeline;
• Both teams were highly motivated - seeing a demo with many of the key functionality working after just 3 weeks boosted the customer's confidence of the project's success and the whole project team's motivation.

"Our objective is that every single project reaches this level of success, and is not seen as an exception, but as the norm. This way IT will no longer be considered 'the last inefficient industry of the 21st century'. This is our goal and we're on the right path."
Sandra Fernandes, Glintt

PS: Glintt won an Agility Award for this project in 2009.

About the presenter:
Sandra Fernandes is currently Project Manager at Glintt, IT Consulting, with experience in Agile and PMBOK Project Management Methodologies and business experience on the Energy Market, E-Commerce and B2B platforms, Workflow Systems, Wine and Vineyard Business Processes. Previously Sandra was the coordinator of the Web Portals business unit and Project Manager of several on-going projects co-financed by the European Commission. Graduated as a Computer Engineer at the New University of Lisbon in 1995, she enhanced her academic education with the completion of a Masters Degree in 1999 in "Distributed Multimedia Systems" in the School of Computer Studies of the University of Leeds, UK, at the end of which she was awarded a Distinction of Excellence for her work. From 1995 to 1996 she was responsible for the development of a Production Scheduling System for Ford Electronic. From 1996 to 1998, in SMD, she participated in many European Projects as part of the Research & Development team.

This got everyone's attention as Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems, began his NextStep keynote describing how IT departments are typically viewed by their business counterparts; in a word - inefficient.

He was showing a chart by Standish Group to a packed auditorium...that's a pretty awful stat - but why this inefficiency? 

Paulo discussed the faults of the waterfall approach and how business change quickly outstrips IT's ability to deliver and, therefore, the rapid decline into misalignment of IT and the Business. IT backlogs pile up and they don't have enough time to respond to new business needs. To add to this, software ages - according to Gartner, enterprise software reaches the end of its life every 5-7 years. 

All of this, Paulo asserted, results in the cost of change rising exponentially, both as time passes and as the volume of required change increases.  

Paulo shared how OutSystems and its customers and partners are seeing something different from the norm - Efficiency.

Here are some quotes he shared on how people view OutSystems-driven IT depts:


Drilling more deeply into the reasons for the rising cost of change in traditional approaches, Paulo compared them to the OutSystems approach and explained how we have been able to achieve the opposite of industry norms - and effectively addressing the last inefficient industry.

Four key areas of discussion:

1. Software Interdependency - and the domino effect of change in highly coupled architectures. The TrueChange engine in the Agile Platform alleviates the need to manually check for, and resolve the impact of change.

2. Monolithic Architecture that keep growing and don't allow for reuse. The answer, Paulo asserts, is to create and reuse services as needs evolve and to ensure the software is broken up into smaller piece, that are connected through protocols: supported in the Agile Platform through refactoring and the support for iterative and bottom-up SOA.

3. Broken Application Lifecycles - where the connection between requirements, development, deployment and monitoring is not seamless. These are addressed in the Agile Platform by Embedded Change Technology, 1-click Publishing and Performance Management.

4. Low Knowledge Transfer - when developers leave the team, so does knowledge of the systems they worked on and it takes time to ramp new people. The Agile Platform answer: Model Driven Development.  Here Paulo shared an interesting example to show how models can simplify knowledge transfer: in a real customer's environment 13,157,961 lines of code are represented in the model by 1602 processes, 987 web pages and 745 data structures.  The math is easy: the less elements there are to understand, the easier the knowledge transfer.

Paulo discussed the typical push-back he hears about the model-driven approach: it's only for building toy apps vs. enterprise-class, and problems scaling to real business needs. He looked into the issues of traditional RAD tools, mashup platforms and the combination of the cloud.  Wrapping up with how the Agile Platform was built for scale and to enable the smooth transition from tactical solutions to strategic, enterprise-class.

He closed by saying you could stabilize the cost of software change at a low level, and make IT more efficient by doing the following:

Today is the first day of OutSystems' Annual User Conference - NextStep. This year we have over 661 agile practitioners registered for the conference (more than doubling last year!) and they'll soon be pouring into the Estoril Congress Center, in the beautiful seaside resort of Estoril - just outside Lisbon, Portugal.

This morning, our OutPartner community, represented by partners from all over Europe and the US, is meeting for a quarterly InStep session.  After lunch, we're looking forward to the kick-off of NextStep by Massimo Pezzini, VP and Gartner Fellow, and his keynote on how organizations can improve IT efficiencies in this new decade.




If you are unable to be with us in beautiful Portugal this week - we haven't forgotten about you! We'll be blogging and tweeting on the conference sessions, which you can follow on our NextStep social media page.

If you're attending the conference - we'd love to hear your thoughts - in person, on our blog or in the twittersphere!  Please share your shots of the conference on the Flickr page and don't forget to use the twitter #nxstep hashtag!