Garlik, a UK based identify-fraud security company shared some of their recent success with Agile in an article on computer weekly. They built their main product, Datapatrol, from concept to completion in just 9 months. Datapatrol is a new monthly monitoring service that finds, tracks and monitors one's personal information online.
Garlik attributed their success to working with highly skilled local developers and an Agile methodology, instead of offshoring. They thought that Waterfall would have made delivering in 9 months impossible because of spending time specifying everything instead of starting coding from day one. Even though they made mistakes, accepting and dealing with failure was an important skill.
Garlik's methodology included:
Garlik attributed their success to working with highly skilled local developers and an Agile methodology, instead of offshoring. They thought that Waterfall would have made delivering in 9 months impossible because of spending time specifying everything instead of starting coding from day one. Even though they made mistakes, accepting and dealing with failure was an important skill.
Garlik's methodology included:
- Working software was delivered in fortnightly cycles for almost a year, increasing to weekly cycles in the final two months.
- Involving business people, marketing, testing and developers in every conversation, whether technical or business strategy.
- Face-to-face conversations wherever possible, plus using VoIP to bring together the distributed team.
- Leadership consisted of facilitation of conversations, rather than being task-driven.
- Timing divided into 14-day time boxes, with deliverables agreed at the start of each two-week cycle.
- Garlik took responsibility for the outcome and did not use contractual leverage to manage suppliers.