Technical development with agile methods at ComAround

My name is Conny Sandström and, since the beginning of 2012, I have held the post of CTO which covers responsibility for all technical development at ComAround. At present, ComAround develops its technical systems in accordance with tried and tested agile methods. However, not so long ago, things looked rather different.

Previous agile methods

Formerly, agile methods followed the waterfall model (showing how a software project can be organised) and development projects were initiated with a long requirement specification period. We attempted to work out all those demands that the next generation of the technical platform should satisfy. This was how work on the project that nowadays we call ComAround Zero™ was started. It was a station ambition that ComAround Zero™ should do everything that the previous generation did but much better. In addition, there was a whole series of new requirements from both customers and internal orderers that ComAround Zero™ was expected to fulfill and that were practically impossible to implement in the existing solution.

It was certainly hard to foresee everything and, what is more, define it in documentation but we certainly made the attempt. Finally, we had extensive documentation, with lots of text and images. However, it was even more difficult from this documentation to come up with exactly what should be built and, above all, in which order. All requirements were loosely formulated, without a common format, and neither the profit nor the cost of each requirement specification was clear.

The systems developers did their best and attempted to build a system taking into account all those demands and requests that were documented. The long discussions that arose every time we attempted to analyse a requirement meant that finally we avoided raising the issue. In order to make progress in work...

Follow this link to read the full article at our wordpress blog.