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I LUV Agile Platform: a customer story

By Maysoon A on August 3, 2010 4:22 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

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?

XDx - Using Agile Development to Support Scientific Research Studies

By Maysoon A on May 4, 2010 2:33 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal recently ran articles on an important new blood test, called AlloMap, which was developed by XDx, a cutting-edge biopharma based in California. What's AlloMap, and why is it making headlines? From the New York Times article:

A blood test that analyzes genetic activity could let heart transplant patients avoid many of the invasive and uncomfortable biopsies now used to monitor whether their immune systems are rejecting their new organs, doctors said in a study published Thursday.

The study found that patients who were monitored for rejection using the blood test had outcomes roughly equivalent to those of patients who were given frequent heart biopsies.

It's an impressive development in the area of cardiovascular medicine, and according to one doctor quoted in the article, XDx's AlloMap "will cause a paradigm shift in how we monitor for rejection."

So what does this have to do with agile development or OutSystems?

XDx used the OutSystems Agile Platform to create the business application it now uses to track and analyze the diagnostic tests required in clinical studies. The application replaced XDx's former Excel-based and manually intensive processes, increasing their ability to study clinical data in a timely manner. Using Agile Platform, XDx delivered its first application to business users in only 6 weeks - including one week of fine-tuning. XDx's story is only one example of the kind of applications that are being built using Agile Platform, but we think it's a pretty remarkable one.

If you want to learn more about how XDx turned to Agile Platform to meet the ever-changing requirements they were receiving from their scientists, check out the case study, or watch the above clip of Stefan Meier, Principal Software Architect in XDx's Information Sciences Department. You can also read about Stefan's presentation at NextStep in which he discussed the XDx experience of introducing Agile.

Agile Application LifeCycle Management - A Travel Case Study

By Mike Jones on November 10, 2009 9:34 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks

We were all very excited to hear one of our customers, Max Rayner, speak at the recent ALM Expo on how he and his team built and delivered the www.fly.com system using an agile approach. If you're not familiar with it, this is an internet application that's openly available and was built using Agile methodologies, SCRUM techniques and an Agile ALM toolset.

Max is the CTO of Travelzoo - a travel publisher with 18 million subscribers and fly.com is an online app that helps you find the exact match to your air travel needs. During the webcast Max discussed the problem space, their agile approach, the innovative metasearch engine, how they managed a distributed team, challenges, key learnings and reasons for their success. travelzoo agile approach.jpg

With all that said, I can't really do the webcast justice in this blog as there was SO much great information shared - but you can:

1) download the webcast presentation slides.pdf and listen to the podcast

2) view the full recording of the webcast here (unfortunately, you will need to register but its free and painless.)

3) or, you can download the podcast of the presentation here and listen in your own time.

BTW, the recordings include a great Q&A session that I would highly recommend listening to! Here are some stats Max shared on the fly.com agile project:

Duration

Expected: 28 weeks Actual: 32 weeks
Number of Sprints: 14 (including a tuning sprint,) Number of Demos: 12
250 change requests (using Agile Platform Embedded Change Technology)
4 week tuning sprint & 4 versions released during tuning

The Team

Business Sponsor: Chief Technology Officer
1 Engagement Manager, 1 Delivery Manager, 3-5 Developers & 1 QA
7 Key Users

Technology

OutSystems Agile Platform used for: requirements gathering, design, integration, component assembly, version control & configuration management, deployment & performance management
Over 20 integrations w/ databases, third party systems etc
.NET environment.

I believe this case study to be a great testament to the Agile development approach; the project achievements speak for themselves:

1. Fly.com is able to handle a sustained load of 40,000 searches per hour with 99.8% availability

2. Fly.com functionality delivered with less cost & faster than competitive solutions

3. 6 months to deliver working system that was stress tested, and then new features added to meet & beat the competition

4. Less than 1 year to develop & release what competitors had taken 2+ years to achieve

5. Compares prices from hundreds of airlines & online travel sites with just one user search. Integration of 12+ distinct information providers in real-time, aggregating all the data received, stored & made available asynchronously

6. Links to hundreds of external sites with over 30 types of parameter formatting & integration methods.

What were your major take-away's' from Max's webcast? Have you come across other case studies of major applications that have been built with Agile methods? Are these Agile case studies useful to you and should we publish more here?

Driving Agile Success - A CIO's Mandate

By Mike Jones on October 20, 2009 1:49 PM | 6 Comments | No TrackBacks

The challenge we see in many Enterprise IT shops is that it is hard to get everyone across the business who touches application development 'on board' with an agile approach. In this blog post I want to share how the CIO of one of our customers has set guidelines which help drive agile project delivery across the business.

The customer is a large Portuguese food distribution and consumer goods manufacturing company, with an international presence. With nearly 25,000 employees they are used to having huge IT projects, involving multiple departments with complex requirements, large budgets and long timelines.

Before agile, many of these projects were delivered late, over budget and in some cases actually failed. In 2005 they became an OutSystems customer; embracing the Agile Platform and an agile methodology. As they matured in their agile practices, the CIO saw the value and today they operate under the CIO's mandate that only projects scoped with a timeline of less than three months and a budget under 300K will be approved.

What happened before the CIO mandate was put in place? Here's what they told us:

1. They would spend two to three months in meetings, aligning all opinions in order to create a huge requirements document;

2. When they finally started developing the systems the business team had disappeared and in most cases forgotten about the project;

3. By the time the project was ready to be tested the key users had changed, the business had changed and the project delivery team immediately entered into a lengthy negotiation phase to reconcile what was delivered versus what the business really needed.

This customer states that with the agile methodology and their new CIO mandate they improved the success rate of their projects in several ways:

1. The business team is more motivated and involved as they are able to see how the projects are progressing on a regular basis;

2. The business gets to be more responsible for the decisions that shape the project direction because they see and constantly test the application;

3. The business and IT avoid the costly, wasteful exercise of building complex requirements documents because they now fully realize that they can never document every detail in a specification;

4. From very early on in the project, IT can see if the project is really what the company needs and identify any mis-matches quickly to reduce the amount of time, dollars and resources that might be wasted.

5. Even for big projects, Agile methodology is used - and forces the team to split the project into phases. This exercise divides the scope into smaller, manageable projects with incremental releases and decreased risk.

So, both for this CIO and many others, we are finding that an agile approach to application development really helps increase project success rate and reduce risks. Even in a company like this one that has complex application needs, lots of departments and bureaucracy - agile really works!

What are the technical leaders in your company doing to help drive agile project delivery? Or, what would you like to see them doing?

Share their rules, guidelines and mandates along with your ideas!

NextStep'09 presentations are now available!

By Maysoon A on April 30, 2009 3:05 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

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!

Introducing Agile: Hidden Benefits (and some challenges)

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 3:47 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

Our next presentation was by Stefan Meier, Associate Director, Software Development, Information Sciences Department at XDx. Xdx is a biotech company that relies on software and technology for their Molecular Diagnostic Technology. They assess patients who have had a heart transplant and whether they are likely to accept or reject the transplant. They are also working on a clinical study to provide the data to find correlations between genetics and pathology in disease/immune system-related areas.

Prior to Agile & OutSystems - the development team was 5 developers and 2 SQA and 1 project manager using classical waterfall methods - with 3 Web-based EDC systems for clinical trials, 2 internally developed LIMS applications (1 FDA regulated), several custom query/reporting/maintenance applications and Excel spreadsheets for reporting.

One key problem Stefan highlighted was that each member of the development team used their own chosen environment - Java, PHP, .NET and VB! This degree of complexity and development approach caused lower levels of productivity than they would have liked - for example before OutSystems and Agile, a project that should have taken 4 months took 1 year to deliver.

With all the requirements of the business and limited ability to increase the size of the development team, the Xdx IT team decided to create a unified software architecture using SOA and deliver new applications while reducing maintenance costs and developing reusable components.

One of the missing pieces of the puzzle turned out to be OutSystems and the Agile approach. They decided to choose a platform and not the method first...(a little different to most as they did not choose the methodology first). Several reasons - including the need for a rapid development platform to keep up with the needs of their scientists. Another nice side-effect of this choice was that it meant Xdx could side-step the platform wars - and introduced a new option - OutSystems and its Agile Platform.

After 15 months and many applications built with the Agile Platform - Stefan noted were several effects:

Probably the best benefit: A new way to interact with the business users, because with each demo the users could SEE the app as it was being developed, even in the very early stages...and the tangible results (even after the first sprint) helped build user's confidence and adoption of the idea of Agile within the company.

The biggest challenge was unanticipated: resistance of the Agile Platform within the development team itself. The resistance was because of perceived platform restrictions and potential skills deterioration. Stefan said that the second issue is probably more difficult to address - and they did it by enabling the developers to move around different projects. Stefan shared that the "Platform restriction" objection often went away as the developers got hands-on with the platform, although criticism was dependent on the profile of the developer. Stefan categorized the profiles as "The Programmers" who were OK with the Platform because they could get so much more done, the "Hacker Genius" who writes entire apps with 1 line of Perl code - who are likely complain the most and may or may not ever be a convert. And, finally the "Theorist" who just thinks the very idea of using a "platform" is just wrong - they may change their mind after getting hands-on with the technology but not always.

Integrating the 2-man QA team with the Dev team - the QA team was classically trained on the waterfall method and FDA approval requires rigorous testing. They tried combining the 2 processes - that didn't really work. So, they tried handing over pieces of the app for testing periodically - this worked to a degree but was uncomfortable for the testers since they didn't like testing a product that was incomplete.The third try was to integrate a member of the QA team with the rest of the team from the beginning of the project and they were able to start testing in the sprints...they were then much happier since they knew about all the decisions that were made during development process. Also - the testers were able to provide important input on how to improve system testability during development. The team's next step is to introduce an automated testing tool for regression testing - making QA even happier!

"Agile IS as valid a process as waterfall method in a regulated environment" since documentation is being developed along with the application - however it's important to keep the documentation at the appropriate level of details (e.g. patient care require very detailed documentation). Design reviews are the other requirement - and each demo is used as a formal design review - therefore implicitly fulfilling this requirement through the development process.

After 15 months with Agile & OutSystems it is now the de facto standard for building web applications at Xdx. They have built 3 apps (7 production releases) and around 5-6 reusable services. A great success so far!

They are also a step closer to having a unified software infrastructure with reusable services. They have shortened turn-around time from request to delivery - and providing high quality and high impact applications.

Last but not least - the new architecture, approach and tools have enabled consistent data across all divisions through integrated applications - a very important aspect in the clinical trial process!

Have you had any experience of combining Agile and Waterfall methods? What did you think of the XDx team's solution to the QA challenge?

Launching a New Company in a Fast and Agile Way

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 3:12 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Miguel Barreto, CEO of Home Energy spoke to us next on "Launching a New Company in a Fast and Agile Way" Home Energy is a new company that's part of the Martifer, a Portuguese renewable group. Home Energy was established in May 2008 with a goal of being a market leader in a new space opened up by new regulations related to Energy Certification and Microgeneration (small photovoltaic panels for home use) for the domestic housing market. January 2009 was when the market was going to take off and Home Energy needed to be ready to support a 200,000 housing market.

A little explanation: new domestic home sales require an energy certification on the Energy Class of their home and measures/recommendations that can be taken for improving energy efficiency. E.g. solar panels, window types and insulation. The Energy Class is dependent how much energy a house requires to keep it comfortable as compared to established benchmarks.

The big challenge was to be ready for a January 2009 launch with a company that was started in May 2008! The Home Energy business plan and strategy relied on strong technical support and had a goal of having a live system in place by October 2008, with just 3 months for development.

Miguel described the Home Energy system where a client has to call the call center (or real estate agent partners send in clients through the website) - a team of 50 field agents/consultants are scheduled throughout Portgual to visit the client homes and assess their Energy Class. This information is uploaded to the servers and the experts at home office execute the process to establish the Energy Class - customers then pay for the assessment online, at which point the team is able to make the home's Energy Certification available.

While other potential vendors said they could not address all of Home Energy's requirements within the timeframe - the OutSystems Partner Reditus proposal using the OutSystems Agile Platform was chosen because of its ability to address the aggressive timetable, develop rapidly and change while the systems was in production - as new business requirements came up.

Although Miguel was initially skeptical on the flexibility of the tool and how easy it would be to change things -he was very pleased with how it worked in practice. He felt that the multiple sprint approach enabled the business team to get a really good feel for the application as it was being developed -allowing them to make improvements while it was being built and ensure it addressed their needs.

Miguel showed a number of very cool screenshots of their complete application - including integration with GPS systems for home location and aerial pictures of the house; the ability for consultants to draw on house maps, and assuming enough information...almost automatic generation of the certificate for the clients. Built with a team of 8 people in the first 3 months, this fully integrated system went into production on time and Miguel and team were extremely happy with the outcome.

Miguel wrapped up with a set of their key findings:

A good RFP that focused on key user needs was critical - even though things have changed since. Approx 70% of the original RFP was implemented - the other 30% were "wish list" items that the team realized they didn't really need...and were subsequently replaced by another 50% that came from market changes after the initial system was implemented.
Short rounds (sprints) of demos with key users were extremely important, establishing a good working relationship and interactions between users and technology team.
Flexible tools facilitate and enable entrepreneurial flexibility - a very important point that underlies the overall success of this case study.
"Custom is better and more efficient than standard approaches" - Miguel's past experience with a packaged or standardized approach is that it became very difficult since the package too much functionality than was needed for the business users - but he felt that custom builds were possible without huge expense - even though they meant potential rough starts.
The development team was dedicated to this project and their spirit and proactivity was very important for ultimate success - where they focused on the end result and drove overall success.

This is the second case study where we've heard about how changes in economy or regulation open up new market opportunities - for those who are the most innovative and nimble (the other was Andries Schilt at Main Energie) - are you seeing the same thing happen in your industry? What technologies are you using to take advantage of the opportunities?

E.ON Benelux: Using Agile to Quickly Adapt to Meter Market Changes

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 1:12 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Next up at NextStep - Marteijn Mout who is the project managers of the 'New meter market model' at E.ON Benelux. E.ON is one of Europe's largest Energy providers with over 30 million customers in 30 countries. E.ON Benelux has around 270,000 customers and they have been a customer of OutSystems since 2004.

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.

Describing the team's experience of using OutSystems Agile approach he told us that:

They started with 5 iterations (sprints), with a period length of 2 weeks
Sprint 6 was added to address new change requests
Weekly progress reports with 2 demo's after every sprint and 2 week testing periods after demos
Change Management requests were registered in OutSystems Agile Network (OAN), ECT and assumptions documented

Key challenges that the experienced:

They were initially skeptical of the OutSystems size and scope estimate for the project - but happy that the results were delivered as expected.
Intensive collaboration - Marteijn quipped that "I'm not sure how many emails I received from and sent to the OutSystems team - but there were a LOT. It wasn't bad - but was an indication of the degree of collaboration!"
"We had some initial challenges on combining Waterfall and Agile methods - especially in planning - we were lucky that OutSystems' approach was flexible on that front, and we were able to combine planning into a single planning/test plan."
The greatest issue was they found was the temptation to keep adding new requirements - and it was important to keep that reigned in where possible.

End results of the project were a success!

The Customer Portal and underlying SMDR "engine" meet all requirements and more!
OutSystems were a good sparring partner for architectural and functional matters
OutSystems were flexible as promised (planning/adaptability)
Communication lines efficient, effective and sound - even with a LOT of emails ;)
Realistic planning/sizing and no budget overruns
The Agile approach and technology is a big success factor for the project!

How are you coping with the amount of inter-team communications that's required by Agile - what tools are you using?

Dynamic Business Applications and Insurance

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 12:22 PM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

In this NextStep session Pedro Rosa Santos who leads the consulting services team for Keep it Simple, an OutSystems Partner, addressed how Dynamic Business Applications can play a big part in the Insurance industry.

Pedro described the quantum leap experienced in the Insurance industry from 2005-2008 as it tried to deal with market demand for new products, online self service, the need for real-time information exchange with agent & broker channels and the drive to invest in new technology in order to reduce costs. The problem, Pedro explains, is that this has created an extremely complex IT environment for most Insurance companies around the globe - and the goal of building an infrastructure that is responsive to market needs - actually started to have the opposite result - preventing responsiveness!

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:

Pedro describes Dynamic Business Applications as applications where you can change business rules or change the front-end extremely rapidly - in a couple of hours or a couple of days. In order to move forward in this way, Pedro recommended the following steps:

Identify a back-office dynamic business application
Migrate business logic and rules that can provide functionality to other services (like portal, CRM or BI)
Portals, product pricing & management + claims management - adapt them to be changed easily, on a dialy basis and delivered to the end-user.
Bring business process and business rules from the portal to the back-end, and make available to the portals and other apps.

"Portals should be built as Dynamic Business Apps, built with technologies like OutSystems - which can enable rapid change."

Pedro and the Keep it Simple team recommend that their customers and (probably applicable other industries)

Improve your organization's time to market
Use Agile methods get closer to end-user and address their needs
Identify which components should be embracing change. You don't have to change everything all the time, but some systems need to adapt to change faster than others.
Invest to consolidation of IT IS around Dynamic Businss Applications.

Have you heard of Dynamic Business Apps and Lean & Agile Development - what do you think of it? Will it work for you?

Extending Core Systems in a SOA Environment

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 11:42 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks

The "Agile Delivery Experiences" track was kicked off by Rosa Mimoso, Director of Global & Support Systems of Caixa Seguros. Rosa shared how Caixa Seguros e Saude,Portugal's largest insurance group used Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and OutSystems Agile technologies to address their extremely large and complex business and technology environment (millions of customers & claims, 4 companies, 5 brands and hundreds of legacy apps.)

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.

Rosa described the benefits that SOA & Agile brought to Caixa Seguros e Saude:
-A single point of access for all solutions
-Formally documented services supported by WSDL
-Real time control: centralized logs & reporting; performance indicators and alerts.
-Simplified management of multi-channel configurations, dynamic content and a common security model
-Faster component upgrade
-Simplified B2B Integration

Rosa wrapped up her presentations with the Caixa Seguros e Saude team's 5 key findings:

1.The systems in different layers need to be able to evolve at different speeds.
2.Integration needs to be independent from system evolution
3.New systems need to be introduced smoothly and without disruptions
4.This approach requires a paradigm shift in the core systems classification
5.Technology needs to allow Business and IT to be aligned.

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