July 2010 Archives

Last Monday I had the pleasure of participating in a Sogeti event dedicated to Agile Platforms and Tools. The event was organized by Samuel Ranzato and it was split into three talks: one about Visual Studio 2010, presented by Clemens Reijnen from Sogeti; one about the Rational tools, presented by Ton van Velzen from IBM; and one about the OutSystems Agile Platform, presented by myself.

Both the Visual Studio and Rational tools presentation focused mostly on project management, and the life-cycle of issues and change requests. Some tools were shown that help developers keep track of what they have to do, and what they need to test.

Instead of going for Project Management, I decided to take a different approach and focused on the tools that help developers do actual Agile development. Time was short, so I picked four key aspects of a project we believe are fundamental to ensuring project success when going Agile. These four points were based on the more than 600 Agile projects OutSystems has delivered, and for each, I demoed aspects of the Agile Platform to show how we can help:

In the end I was very happy with the reaction of the 40 odd people that were in the room! I had the chance to talk with some of the attendees after the event, and I was really glad the Platform had once again made a great impression.

My only regret was that I didn't have more time to talk some other Agile challenges. If you were doing such a talk, what Agile challenges would you pick?

"ECT is a technology that allows the end users of my application to place a pinpoint on the working application, type a text message, and hit a button to submit their feedback. In the back-office, I then receive the screenshot of the application web page with the user's pinpoint plus the text message. (You can see a quick demo of the ECT in action.)"

ECT makes use of Enterprise Manager, a solution provided by OutSystems that centralizes all common administration tasks such as users, roles and the existing applications' back-offices. Installing it is easy. Just download it from the OutSystems Network and use the Solution Pack Tool to 1-Click publish the solution. "Next, you repeat this process, but with the ECT solution; download ECT here, open it, and click 1-Click Publish."

Justin provides a great step-by-step explanation in his article on how to configure ECT in Enterprise Manager, and moves on to using the ECT configuration wizard to customize its behavior. "The wizard is pretty self-explanatory from here. One thing to keep in mind is that you may not want to add ECT to every eSpace on a production server. Then again, you might want to after all!"

With ECT up and running, users started to send feedback about RatCatcher. As Justin puts it, this "feedback system is far better than receiving the typical email from a user where they have a hard time describing what the problem is. It can be used for bug reports as well as suggestions for improvements." 

One point Justin mentions is that he might have "to find a way to educate users about ECT". ECT is very discreet and "the bottom right is the least viewed part of the screen." This was actually a design decision we made at OutSystems. Although we want ECT to be ever-present, so users can submit feedback whenever they want, we don't want it to get in the way of the application.

I hope Justin keeps getting excellent feedback from his users on RatCatcher, and I'm sure the app will continue to get better and better! In the meantime, we'll be waiting for the next installment of the Developer Diary!