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This week I had the chance to interview Rui David, a long-time OutSystems partner and enthusiast. We talked about how he got interested in OutSystems, the impact OutSystems has made on his professional life and why he decided to create a new website aggregating listings of OutSystems jobs. I hope you find his journey with OutSystems as interesting as I did.

Hi Rui. Thanks for letting us have a moment of your time.
My pleasure.

Why don't you start by letting our readers know a bit about you?
My name is Rui David, and I've been working with OutSystems and the Agile Platform for quite a while now. When I was 2 years old my parents took me to Brazil, and I lived there for the first part of my life. Around 1998 I came back to Portugal, and started working at ROFF, an IT consulting firm specialized in SAP, and an OutSystems partner.
 
How did you end up getting involved with OutSystems?
In 2001 I watched a presentation of the Agile Platform done by Francisco Menezes and Paulo Rosado, and I fell in love with it. I ended up getting involved by helping to develop an extension to connect to SAP, and it was great. Bear in mind that at that time the OutSystems Agile Platform was in its infancy. If I recall correctly, we were using version 2.0, back then there was no such thing as 1-Click Publishing, or most of the other cool features we have today. But I could see that the Agile Platform was the way to go.
 
At that time my boss was very skeptical about this technology, and he didn't really support my involvement with the Agile Platform. However, one day there was a need for an OutSystems consultant for a long-term project, and I came up to my boss saying "Well, we have a challenge with OutSystems...". He immediately pushed back, saying that he didn't want to hear me talking about OutSystems, but the moment I said that there was an opportunity to place a consultant of ours in such a project, he went "now we're talking!", and was sold.
 
From then on, we started investing in OutSystems, and at the time grew quickly to having 12 people working in OutSystems across multiple projects.
 
That's quite a story. What exactly enticed you about OutSystems at the time?
Well, at the time I fell in love with the vision - and really, there were very few people paying attention to this. The company was still in the old offices, the Agile Platform as we know it nowadays still didn't exist... It was a small group of people who believed in this, with some external people who also believed, and I wanted to be part of it.
 
Now that I think of it, the amount of opportunities that OutSystems generated for all those involved, and the amount of companies that were created around OutSystems is huge. I mean, the number of projects I participated in, changing companies, going to customers abroad... OutSystems knowledge really became an asset, and a valuable one. Even if at the time people told me to stick with SAP and the traditional languages, looking back I know that the investment I did at the time has clearly paid off. It was really great.
 
What's the thing you like the most about working with OutSystems?
The thing I like the most has to be the grand finale, the "wow" that customers get when their project is all delivered. One thing I like about selling OutSystems is that you arrive at a customer with this huge problem, and I'd just drag things around and it was done... You wouldn't believe how many times I got "I can't believe this - it's too good to be true"! The look on the customers' faces is always priceless.
 
We get a lot of that "too good to be true" comment! How did your career evolve from here? What came next?
In 2005 I was presented with an opportunity to go to Madrid for a pre-sales position for OutSystems projects, on behalf of a company called Intionis. I stayed there for a while, and I even translated the OutSystems training contents to Spanish so people could learn it better, but eventually one of the partners left the company for personal reasons, and I decided to come back to Portugal. I often say that it was a great opportunity, and I learned a lot about people management, but it was also the most expensive Spanish course I ever had! (laughter)
 
Returning back to Portugal, I worked in several OutSystems partner companies as Delivery Manager, Engagement Manager at times, and other times as a one-man-show. It's all in a day's life for an IT consultant.
 
What about now? What's next for you?
Recently, an opportunity came up for me to go abroad again. This started back when I was in Spain. At the time, I went to Brazil to evangelize OutSystems, and did some workshops at a couple of universities. I gave them training in OutSystems, Agile, and after the training the best students would be invited to work in remote projects, from Brazil to Spanish customers. I ended up delivering some projects with the remote teams.
 
However, one of the university professors and one of students at the time worked at WPD, the leading Brazilian healthcare IT systems and consulting services provider. Three years later, WPD was searching for a new leading IT development platform, found the OutSystems web site and evaluated the Agile Platform. When they were in the process of becoming OutSystems customers, they approached me directly to go and work for them in Brazil so I am getting ready for a new adventure.
 
Recently your new OutSystems Jobs website started getting some buzz around it. Could you tell us what's that all about?
The idea for this project was born from the fact that I'm going abroad again. The last time I returned from an international assignment, one of the things I hated the most was not knowing what was going on in the OutSystems ecosystem. For example, who were the new partners, how had the market evolved, and so I had a hard time catching up. Even getting to came back now and then it was hard to keep up with everything. On the other hand, the most satisfying thing I found was that when I left there were 5 OutSystems partners, and when I returned back in 2005 there were 15!
 
This time around, I thought that the best way to keep up with all the action and also help others in a similar situation was to have things go through me, and centralizing all job offers regarding OutSystems in a single site!
 
That idea came up one day during work, and then I pulled it off during the weekend, and published a few job posts there immediately. From then on, I spread the site around, and the snowball effect started. The site's been up for 4 weeks now, and for an OutSystems-only job site, it's already getting a consistent 30-visits a day from all around the world, with Portugal being the majority of them and Netherlands in second with 11% of the visits.
 
What are the plans for the future of the website?
Well, while initially it started with me seeding the site with existing job postings for OutSystems, the idea is for it to grow organically. I already have 15 different entities posting jobs every day, and over 140 job postings there. Hopefully it'll keep growing, and will have even more people using it.
 
The idea in the long run is to evolve to a full OutSystems jobs site, where we also have different user profiles, so, whenever a job posting comes, the profiles are immediately matched to the posting so that the users who want to be notified of specific job postings will receive them. Companies will also get to know exactly who in the database fits the profile - as long as the users have given permission for it, of course.
 
Also, I'd like to consider how to link the website to the actual OutSystems site.
 
Cool. I'm sure that the website is already a frequent stop of our community members. And from our part, is there anything you would like OutSystems to improve in the future?
I'd love if OutSystems would make it easier for us to deploy applications in the most popular and standard hosting services, such as GoDaddy. That would be very interesting, and it's the main reason I sadly didn't choose to make the OutSystems Jobs website using the Agile Platform.
 
That feedback is much appreciated. Before we wrap it up, do you have some final words for our readers and members of the community?
Years back I made a bet on OutSystems, and what I see today is that the bet clearly paid off. It was the right one to make even when everyone was against me. But the truth is that working with OutSystems and the Agile Platform is easy, and I'll keep betting on it.

Many times people come to me with the question of whether they should pursue .Net or OutSystems. My reply to them - and a question to the readers - is whether they want to be programmers or consultants.
 
Do they want to earn money by typing lines of code, or actually making things happen? With OutSystems, you know what the end goal is, and you can just focus on that.
 
Thanks a lot for your time. Good luck with your new venture!

If you want to learn more about OutSystems-related jobs, don't hesitate to drop by his website, at www.outsystemsjobs.com, and catch-up with the latest job postings.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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!

OutSystems' own VP Marketing, Mike Jones, recently wrote an article in Dr. Dobb's on the "death" of custom applications in the enterprise world - and it seems to have caused a bit of a debate - both in comments on the article and in an off-shoot blog post on the same subject.

The supposed killer?  Software packages.  But are custom apps really dead? Mike's take is that while software packages were once considered the silver bullet of enterprise IT, this is no longer the case.  Agile development practice, coupled with a strong delivery platform, has pushed custom development back on par with off-the-shelf solutions and, in some cases, has made custom apps a better choice than their boxed counterparts.

• Read Mike's original article in Dr. Dobbs and the reader comments.
• Also, check out the blog post by Ann All of IT Business Edge, and the question she poses; "will Agile development bring back custom software?"

What's your experience with custom applications versus packaged software?  Do you agree with Mike? Join the conversation!

We're very excited that Justin James (the author of "OutSystems' Agile Platform: IDE of my dreams") over at Tech Republic is chronicling his use of the Agile Platform to build his personal software project, Rat Catcher, which will help media outlets track down plagiarizers and unauthorized uses of their content. 

He recently posted his first diary entry of working with the Agile Platform, and it provides some great insight for new users.

Lots of people have been tweeting on this article already - what do you think?  Are you new to the Agile Platform?  How does Justin's experience compare to yours? Do you have feedback on features or capabilities of the platform?  Let us know!

Last week, the OutSystems team attended the Enterprise Software Development Conference (ESDC) in San Mateo California. This is the first year for this show and, as Alan Zeichick notes, it takes up where the old SD West conference left off.  As gold sponsors of the show, we got to both attend the sessions and talk to the conference attendees at the OutSystems booth. I just wanted to share a few highlights & take-aways from the show:

On Monday afternoon I was pleased to take part in the MythBlasters session and offered the crowd two myths to choose from : #1 "You Cannot Scale Agile in Enterprise IT shops" or #2 "It is less risky and more cost effective to buy a package than to do custom development."

The audience chose to 'blast' the Buy vs. Build myth.  My premise for blasting this myth is based on the success of our customers in building new custom applications for things like customer relationship management, call center management, various HR applications like recruiting, expense management, company portals, etc.  I shared the top three ingredients for successfully building vs. buying:  Speed to develop, rapid change and business involvement at each step.  Of course, our customers accomplish this by using the Agile Platform and an agile methodology.

I think I'll keep Myth #1 for another blog post - but what are you seeing on Buy vs. Build myth? Do you agree that building is a better way to go for many apps where there is a package?
 
Another highlight: Kent Beck's keynote on "Responsive Design: Efficiency Through Safety."  This was the first time I had heard Kent speak.  He started off by referencing Ed Yourdon's work on Systems Design and how it led him to try and distill his own working process for design.  This was the premise for his presentation.  My take-away was that no matter what you do, your design will change. I think we all accept this as fact - especially for application software.  Kent then explained his techniques to reduce the risk when making design changes.  For each of his examples I found myself thinking 'This is not really a problem with the Agile Platform because the TrueChange™ engine will keep you from breaking stuff you did not intend to break, allowing you to move very fast with little risk."  If you are hand-coding, then Kent's four techniques (as described here by Alan Zeichick) to reduce risk when making change is great advice, but why do that if you don't have to?  BTW, I think Kent would love the Agile Platform.

Since this was a new conference we've been asked who attended and why. Here are some thoughts from the OutSystems team:

• The crowd we met included CIOs, IT directors, Enterprise Architects, project managers, analysts and software engineers. Interestingly, a large proportion of the conference attendees represented Enterprise IT (rather than just the ISV folks who usually attend Agile conferences) ...I'd say Agile is definitely going (or has gone) mainstream!
• Many people were there to learn more about Agile and find out if it fit into their world.  They realize that Agile really makes sense, and that they should implement it, but were trying to learn the best ways to do this - both with or without tools to help them.
• The general feeling was that Agile is the growing wave of the present and the future - and many felt they needed to add Agile to their resumes, because it is rapidly growing in popularity.  One attendee stated that he felt Agile was the only "fad" methodology that would last because it actually works and makes sense. 
• A few folks told us they were already using some Agile practices, but just had never labeled them as such and would like to get their organizations to officially adopt Agile.

 

As a follow-up to our previous post; here is the third and final interview question from our conversation with Lawrence Wilkes, Director and Principal Consultant with Everware-CBDi, on how IT departments are addressing their legacy systems: 

Q.3 What are the top three mistakes people make when addressing their legacy?

LW: I might have hoped that post Y2K, organizations would have more actively sought to avoid building yet more legacy systems. However, time and again we see organizations doing the following:

1. Creating another legacy. They fail to understand why they have legacy systems in the first place, and just rush into creating another one. They don't understand the requirement for on-going change, nor does the business encourage them to think about it. This could be due to:  a lack of process - i.e. they don't understand how to facilitate change at each stage of the life-cycle; or, stakeholders unwillingness or inability to express requirements for change.
   
   
2. Not designing for agility. Agility isn't just a process - as in agile development - agility is also an analysis and design requirement. Ensuring a new solution is better able to respond to change than the legacy systems it is replacing requires appropriate techniques throughout the life cycle. It isn't just a matter of creating a more agile implementation built with finer-grained components and services, but also understanding the business's requirements for agility and identifying those components and services in a way that aligns with that. Conversely, you don't need to over-compensate and waste time providing too much agility where it is not needed - although, that is always going to be difficult to predict...
   
   
3. Not cleanly separating the legacy from the new solution. The two become entwined storing up an even bigger legacy problem for the future. For example, a proper service architecture is not developed that is truly independent of the legacy systems, and so the new solution remains tightly coupled to the legacy. Even though they may use loosely coupled technology such as web services, their content and behavior is just a direct reflection of the legacy system.

What do you think? Do you have any do's and don'ts on addressing legacy that you'd like to share with the community?

Lawrence Wilkes is a Director and Principal Consultant at Everware-CBDI. Lawrence is a frequent speaker, author and consultant on best practice in SOA, Application Modernization and Enterprise Architecture. Via CBDI Forum, the Everware-CBDI research capability and portal, Lawrence has led the development of the CBDI-SAE methodology and supporting Knowledgebase, which is used by both end-user organizations and system integrators around the world. Lawrence has an extensive background both within end-user and vendor organizations having worked both in the business and IT side, which brings particular insight into business/IT convergence.

As a follow-up to our previous post; here is the second interview question from our conversation with Lawrence Wilkes, Director and Principal Consultant with Everware-CBDi, on how IT departments are addressing their legacy systems: 

Q.2  Is there a role for model-based tools like the Agile Platform in legacy modernization?

LW: Although a large part of the functionality may be based on those that already exist in legacy systems, there is still a need to design and assemble the new solution that is typically focused on supporting a new business process, channel or product.  This requires a layer of new development that 'wraps' the legacy systems, and the capabilities created out of the legacy still need to be integrated into that new solution. For example, capabilities in the legacy systems might become service providers to the new solutions.

At the same time, new capabilities are likely to be required since legacy modernization usually entails more than the need to re-skin, or re-process the legacy system. There will be new business requirements that the legacy system didn't address.  Hence, model-based tools can be very useful in terms of:

a.      Designing and implementing the new process and UI layers
b.      Creating the services that wrap the legacy capabilities
c.      Creating both new business functionality, and new components & services to support them
d.      And finally, assembling it all together into the new solution.

Have you used a model-based tool to help with your legacy? What have been the benefits?

In the next and final question, Lawrence offers the top three mistakes people make with their legacy modernization efforts.  

Lawrence Wilkes is a Director and Principal Consultant at Everware-CBDI. Lawrence is a frequent speaker, author and consultant on best practice in SOA, Application Modernization and Enterprise Architecture. Via CBDI Forum, the Everware-CBDI research capability and portal, Lawrence has led the development of the CBDI-SAE methodology and supporting Knowledgebase, which is used by both end-user organizations and system integrators around the world. Lawrence has an extensive background both within end-user and vendor organizations having worked both in the business and IT side, which brings particular insight into business/IT convergence.

We recently met with Lawrence Wilkes, Director and Principal Consultant with Everware-CBDi, to talk about how IT departments are addressing their legacy systems. 

We will post Lawrence's response to the following three questions over our next few blog posts:

• What are the top three things you've seen people do to successfully address the competing demands of new build vs. legacy modernization with limited resources?

• Is there a role for model-based tools like the Agile Platform in legacy modernization?

• What are the top three mistakes people make when addressing their legacy?

#1   What are the top 3 things you've seen IT do to successfully address the competing demands of new build vs. legacy modernization when faced with limited or shrinking resources?

LW: My experience is enterprises that are really successful tend to buck the trend. They are more radical and don't just "follow the crowd". Rather, there are usually one or two key people who have an architectural vision that breaks new ground - at least from their organization's perspective. Typically they will:
 

1. Combine application modernization and business improvement programs. They get business stakeholders involved in understanding the options for modernizing, both in terms of business needs and the applications that allow a more radical approach to be taken to requirements.  They avoid the knee-jerk reaction of buying a package or simply outsourcing the entire problem because they are seen as expedient options that, however, often results in something that is no better able to respond to change than the legacy it is replacing. Instead, they are keen to search out economies of scale and cost; capitalizing on existing investments in applications where possible, rather than just throwing them away, and break-down organizational and application silos to create solutions that are genuinely more flexible.
   
    
2. Keep business design and architecture in-house; create strong architecture and Centers of Excellence (CoE) roles that are able to exert strong architectural governance over outsourcing and delivery. They do not allow the outsource parties to gain control, nor do they lose knowledge of their business, applications and environments.
   
   
3. They use agile approaches but are not slavishly following the conventional "agile" manifesto - agile needs to be used within an architected, governed framework, not ad hoc. They establish a formal reference model and framework, which allows rapid delivery and governance of products, delivered by an agile process.
   

What steps has your organization taken to successfully address legacy systems while delivering new systems?

In our next post we will address Q.2 and the role of model-based development tools play with legacy modernization.

Lawrence Wilkes is a Director and Principal Consultant at Everware-CBDI. Lawrence is a frequent speaker, author and consultant on best practice in SOA, Application Modernization and Enterprise Architecture. Via CBDI Forum, the Everware-CBDI research capability and portal, Lawrence has led the development of the CBDI-SAE methodology and supporting Knowledgebase, which is used by both end-user organizations and system integrators around the world. Lawrence has an extensive background both within end-user and vendor organizations having worked both in the business and IT side, which brings particular insight into business/IT convergence.

Today we released a new version of the OutSystems Agile Platform - 5.0! In this version we're taking agile a step further; not only are we supporting the entire application lifecycle management for web applications, we also added support for IT teams to rapidly develop business processes using agile methodologies.

Traditionally, business process development was done at a different pace using different tools than IT used for application development. However, one of the biggest challenges facing the business process world is the integration of business processes with applications; which meant one of them was always waiting for the other.  And, in the case of our customers who already use the Agile Platform, web application development was happening faster than business processes development.

With version 5.0 of the Agile Platform, we have closed that gap! Using the new Business Process Technology capabilities of the platform, IT teams can develop business processes totally integrated with web applications in an agile manner. All artifacts that the Agile Platform provides for Web Application development - like TrueChange technology, 1 Click-Publishing, Real Time Monitoring, and so on - are also available for business process development.

To develop this new capability, the OutSystems R&D team partnered with one of our customers, Van Ameyde, to design and implement this capability. Van Ameyde uses business processes intensively for insurance claims processing and has very heavy change demands for those processes. Customer participation has been key to the development of the new 5.0 functionality, and we believe that it led to a pragmatic implementation of Business Process Technology that will allow IT teams to fulfill the needs of the business from a process perspective, as fast as they have been doing for web applications with the Agile Platform.

Along with Business Process Technology, version 5.0 includes many other improvements that will make developers a lot more productive. If you're already using the Agile Platform, check the videos of some of the improvements we made to the platform. If you want to give it a try for yourself, the best thing to do is download the (free) Community Edition and try out the new capabilities of the platform.

Of course, we could only release such a great version of the Platform with a great team! We had a lot of help from a lot of people, in particular from our Beta customers who provided such excellent early feedback, and a special thanks goes to the 5.0 team that delivered such a great product! Version 5.0 of the Agile Platform will definitely raise the bar for agile.  Give it a try, the 5.0 development team promises you that it ROCKS!

Last month our company announced its new Agility Awards - and the first set of awards were presented for five Agile projects that had been completed by customers and partners using  OutSystems' Agile Platform and employing Agile methodology.  

The question I want to pose is what are good criteria for assessing a successful Agile project? This question builds on Mike's recent post about criteria for measuring an Agile project manager's success - and we got lots of great responses and ideas in the comments.

The data points being used by the OutSystems team to evaluate whether projects are eligible for an award are:

1.    Size & scope of project: the project should be of medium to large scale (over 40,000 software units in size.)

2.    Project definition & objectives: the project should deliver significant and measurable business value.

3.    Project approach: the project should have been run based on Agile practices, following an iterative development approach with regular end user involvement.

4.    Project metrics: a baseline of project metrics must be submitted in order to measure the impact of using Agile to deliver the application.

The team then use these data points to assess whether an Agile approach was employed to deliver the project on time, on budget, with 100% user adoption and delivered true value to the business and IT.
 
Is this list a reasonable set of data points for measuring the success of an agile project?
 

BTW - Here are some examples of the results from the initial set of award winners (read more details here):

XDx - Analysis Request Management System

Time-to-market: 6 weeks + 1 for launch; Number of Agile sprints: 3

Customer quote: "This was our first Agile project and it achieved the two key business goals: avoiding tracking errors and improving real-time data consistency for our studies. Most importantly, we were able to deliver this value to the business in a record time, exceeding both developer's and user's expectations and establishing Agile as the preferred methodology for this type of development project." - Jochen Scheel, Director at XDx.

RWE - Tiger, Implemented by Atos Origin (BTW - nice blog from Atos Origin on the project & award here)

Time-to-market: 14 weeks; Number of Agile sprints: 5 + 1 tuning

Customer quote: "The Gas Portfolio Management application was implemented over a period of three months which was only possible with the OutSystems' Agile Platform and methodology. Their way of sharing information, processing activities and reviewing project deliverables with key users of RWE NL was instrumental to the success of this project."- Perry van de Goorberg, Project Manager at RWE.

OK! teleseguros - Sales Platform and Home Insurance, Implemented by Keep It Simple

Time-to-market: 13 weeks; Number of Agile sprints: 3

Customer quote: "This project was a true success as it exceeded the business's expectations in terms of objectives achieved and above all business benefits. The Agile Platform and methodology allowed the business to engage the development team and see the immediate impact and results of all project changes and decisions." - Sérgio Carvalho, Marketing and Product Director at OK! teleseguros.

Last week's Agile2009 in Chicago was a pleasant surprise in a couple of ways.  First, in a down economy the conference attracted nearly 1400 attendees from around the globe - which is outstanding considering many conferences organizers we've talked to are reporting a 30% decline in attendance. According to the organizers 60% of the attendees were first-timers at the conference which is a testament to the quality of the event. And, there was a large international contingent - we met lots of Aussies, Kiwis, Brits and Europeans; in fact it felt like 50% of the Agilists we spoke to were from outside the US - and great to meet them all! 

Second, after four days of interacting with other conference goers we noticed two trends that were very different from last year's conference:
 
a) The majority of attendees are now actively practicing Agile and have participated in multiple projects.  Last year it seemed many people were attending in order to learn about Agile in preparation for their first project.  This year, our informal (and unscientific) survey showed 53% have been personally involved in over 4 Agile projects.

b) Sprint duration among participants has dramatically reduced from four weeks last year - to two week sprints this year.  During one of the conference sessions this year "Death by SCRUM Meetings," a session attendee told us he estimated the majority of the audience who were polled on the average length of their sprints said two weeks.  This prompted the OutSystems team to do an informal survey of the people we talked to, which confirmed the number - two weeks is the norm for sprint durations.

Agile is definitely becoming main stream. Alistair Cockburn's keynote "I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It" made this point - the days of small co-located teams following the Agile Manifesto are dead and gone.  Today we have very large distributed teams tackling big problems which are changing the face of Agile as it was originally conceived.  The term Agile now encompasses so much more than just doing things faster - Agile is dead, long live agile.


I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It - Alistair Cockburn
Main Take Away: Agile has grown up and no longer in the domain of the few; it has now received the attention of large scale enterprise and evolving faster in terms of maturity.  It is taking on a life of its own.  The speaker noted that he observed this to be true because Agilists are now in the "ri" stage of the "shu-ha-ri" concept.  "ri" being where an individual is now capable of inventing and blending concepts and into new approaches but still within the "Agile" umbrella.  ("shu" - learning a methodology, "ha" - collecting techniques, "ri" - inventing and blending techniques).

Introduction to SCRUM - Henrik Kniberg
Main Take Away: Scrum seems to be the most popular of the agile methods because of its ability to incorporate any technique or tool in its use. Interesting quote for us agile & tools people "Do not develop an attachment to any one weapon or any school of fighting." Miyamoto Musashi, 17th Century Samurai.

WANTED: Seeking Single Agile Knowledge Development Tool-set, Brad Appleton, Peter Alfvin  Main Take Away: Companies in very complex environments developing embedded applications, corporate applications and everything in between will continue to struggle with disparate tools.  

Agile in the Enterprise Corporation, Panel: Israel Gat, Stephen Williams, Laureen Knudsen, Scott Killen  Main Take Away: Why Agile? It's about the money!  Do feature budgeting.  Develop and maintain a release model in a business framework.  Get the organization on board within the dynamics of your specific company - collaborate.  Re-organize to Operational and Executive teams that are cross-functional and make their interaction with R&D asynchronous.

Marriott's Agile Turnaround - Jesse Fewell Main Take Away:"Agile can't fix bad strategy"
                          
First, Kill All the Metrics - Niel Nickolaisen , Chris Matts
Main Take Away: Reward and punishment results in meaningless metrics and thus not all metrics we use are meaningful.  For a metric to be meaningful, it has to measure process and not people; they need to be aligned with the objectives and strategy of the organization; and should show trends.  Metrics that measure people tend to result in unhealthy competition between team members especially in a self-regulating / high performing team.

Strategies in Replacing Systems in Agile Projects - Niklas Bjornerstedt
Main Take Away: Presentation discussed a number of patterns in replacing systems and recognizing these patterns can help in the process.  Although there are patterns that can be used to help in transitioning users, migrating data, etc.; it still boils down to a case by case basis.

How to evolve a Product Backlog - Ronica Roth, Mark Kilby
Main Take Away: The main discussion centered on following the user work flow to evolve the product backlog.  Along with that, ask questions on the 'what' and the 'why' primarily.  The 'how' questions need to focus more on the current processes and not necessarily on the future although it would be good to note that.

Agile Metrics - Dan Rawsthorne
Main Take Away: The talk was directed to organizations that are new to agile.  One of the key points is to level-set on metric-related terminology like what "done" means so that there is no confusion between team and customer.  A suggestion was put forth to create a "doneness criteria" which essentially is a checklist.  Other terms were velocity and capacity that accordingly most folks new to agile get confused on.  The speaker suggested that velocity = capacity until proven otherwise.  Capacity is what you estimate you can do and velocity is what you have proven you can do.

Mike Jones, Robert Neri, Roy Carnes and I are heading to Chicago on Monday to attend this year's Agile 2009 conference. This is OutSystems' second year at the conference and we're looking forward to a great week of Agile learning, meeting new people and community activities. If you're going to be there - stop by the booth and say Hi and join us for Happy Hour during Muzik Masti on Wednesday night - we're buying the drinks!!

Since we are representing many of the OutSystems community who can't be in Chicago next week, we thought we'd invite you to review this year's conference program and if you want to hear more about a particular session just make a request in the comments below and we'll do our best to check it out for you. BTW - we are also planning to tweet (#agile2009) and blog from the conference so stay tuned!

Here's a selection of sessions we're planning to attend with Agile disclaimer: things are likely to change ;)

Monday, August 24th
Early morning travels to Chicago and booth set-up
***also look out for an exciting announcement from OutSystems at 9am EST**

11:00-12:30 Workflow is Orthogonal to Schedule Mary Poppendieck
14:00-14:45 Enterprise Agile Transformation: The Two Year Wall Chuck Maples
14:45-15:30 Zen and the Art of Software Quality Jim Highsmith
17:30-21:00 we'll be at the OutSystems booth breaking ice!

Tuesday, August 25th
07:30-09:00, 12:30-14:00, 19:00-21:00 we'll be back at the OutSystems booth doing demos, giving out drinks tickets to Wednesday's Happy hour, mouse mats, CDs and Apple iTouches!

9:00 Conference keynote: "I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It", Dr. Alistair Cockburn
11:00-12:30 Don't Sell Buzzwords to Business Leaders, Learn How to Describe Real Value R.Sheridan, J. Goebel
14:00-15:30 First, Kill All The Metrics! Niel Nickolaisen, Chris Matts
16:00-17:30 Agile Project Metrics Dave Nicolette

Wednesday, August 26th
07:30-09:00, 12:30-14:00 we'll be back at the OutSystems booth doing demos, giving out Happy Hour tickets
08:15-08:45 Mike Jones "The Power of Enterprise Agile in Action" during Take a S.E.A.T.
09:45-10:30 Performance without Appraisal: What to Do About Performance Reviews Esther Derby
11:00-12:30 The Agile PMP: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks Mike Cottmeyer
14:00-15: Exploratory Testing (Framework) Experience Erik Petersen
16:00-16:45 Enabling Agile Testing through Continuous Integration Sean Stolberg
18:00-20:00 OutSystems & Agile Journal hosting Happy Hour at Muzik Masti, Columbus EF

Thursday August 27th
07:30-09:00, 12:30-14:00 last day at the OutSystems booth doing demo and giving out goodies.
09:00-10:30 Agile Project Management--Innovation in Action Jim Highsmith
11:00-12:30 Beyond features: How to listen to your customers & learn what they really need L. Halley, L. Hohmann
11:00-12:30 Role of the Agile Leader in Reconfiguring the Business Israel Gat
14:00-15:30 A Business Value Focused Model for Story Identification & Prioritisation Shane Hastie
14:45-15:30 Agile won't Work: Implementing Agility in Non-Standard Teams Daniel Markham

This was a great session by John Rymer and Dave West.  They provided some interesting stats:
•    80-90% of IT spend is on software maintenance
•    Business are demanding innovation
•    Time to market is more critical now than ever before.

These three stats should be staring you right in the face - How can you be more innovative in shorter time frames than ever when 80-90% of your budget is spent on maintenance? 

A key message from this session is that software bloat is the biggest issue.  They pointed to five causes for software bloat:

1.    The sheer number of features we attempt to add to an application
2.    Specification and protocol stacks continue to grow
3.    Vendor consolidation leads to large suites which you have to purchase entirely
4.    Middleware continues to get more and more complex
5.    Traditional development processes lead to overly complex applications

Of course the key message is that lean software is the antidote to software bloat.  Agile methods can help us to focus on only the high priority features resulting in leaner software.  The key challenge is how to get your business to support an Agile approach and come to terms with the notion that, in many cases, it is more cost effective to not automate processes that seldom occur - they are better handled manually keeping your applications lean and focused on the key business processes.
 
Feel free to share examples where your business has embraced Agile and successfully de-prioritized application functionality as too low to implement.
  

Last week, I attended Forrester's IT Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.  In looking back over my notes I wanted to share some of the highlights.  The first keynote started off with the resounding words:  "Never Waste a Good Crisis".  Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester  expanded on this notion it appeared that the main point is that during a crisis change tends to be accelerated which should allow those savvy IT organizations to address these key challenges:

•    How do I get leaner and reduce IT waste?
•    How do I protect and promote innovation?
•    How do I reshape my own role?
•    How do I measure and communicate value?

As I listened to the discussion and many of the sessions to follow, I learned that many of the analysts and attendees were becoming aligned with the idea that an Agile approach to application development will help on many of these fronts.  First, it will help IT get leaner and reduce waste by only delivering what the business needs while helping IT with business communication or alignment.  It was also pointed out that if organizations really embrace Agile and let teams be self directed, we should even break down some of the inefficiencies of big, inflexible architecture and allow teams to select the development tools, application stacks, etc to get their jobs done quickly with minimal cost / waste.  What a novel idea!

Bobby also discussed the importance of IT leaders really paying attention to IT Value.  The key point is that value is always perceived.  Some people see value in driving a Mercedes while others see it as a waste of money.  Thus for IT professionals we must make sure that the business sees value in what we deliver.  Thus, we must become more agile and deliver on business objectives in a way that facilitates communication and measures business value - the last key challenge in the list above.  As we all know, an Agile application development approach will dramatically lead to this outcome. 

I found it interesting that Forrester's analysis is showing that many traditional IT roles are being moved into the business - some of the examples given were project management and business analysis roles.  

I am interested to hear if any of you are shifting some roles out of IT and into the business.

If you are wondering what NextStep'09 was all about, the following highlight reel from our 2009 event shows all our Agile conference attendees in action - from keynotes to sessions, partner pavilion and opening reception.

If you attended the event this year - OutSystems customers, partners, special guests and employees are all in here - check it out and see if you can find yourself!