Tags: My first job out of college was for IDX Systems Corporation (Now GE Healthcare). IDX was a large software developer, with over 1000 software developers making huge clinical and financial systems for hospitals like the Mayo Clinic and others.
I was lucky enough to participate on the ‘Web Framework Team’ at IDX - which was the pet project of the CTO at the time, Jeff Sutherland. Jeff was well known for his work with Object Technology, and is very well respected in the industry.
Jeff also was part of a group of people who founded the Scrum Development Process, which is an Agile Development Methodology. Basically, Agile Development is different than traditional software development in that there are regular daily and monthly deliverables, and the process is built to incorporate user requirements throughout the development process.
What this means is that the Agile process does not require all requirements to be specified up front, and is built to accommodate requirements changes mid-development. Agile was built for the real world. Traditional development processes (e.g. ‘waterfall’) were built for the theoretical world.
We have been dabbling with the Scrum Agile development process for two years, and decided to become a hard core agile development shop in December 2006. The quality and timeliness of the beta release are directly attributable to Agile.
If you ask any of our Openads employees, there simply is no meaningful alternative to Agile. It simply is the best way for a team to produce quality software in an efficient manner.
The beta release of Openads v2.3 was built exclusively using Agile practices. In fact, Jen Langdon, our Director of Engineering, is a certified Scrum Master!
For more information, check out the Scrum Alliance. Please leave a comment with your experiences, and the products you built, using Agile!
