Emerge Inc. Blog

Companies are always looking for the best way to deliver an excellent product while using less time and money to produce that product.  In order to save time and money while producing great results, companies that provide internet solutions and software are looking for the most efficient ways to develop these products.  On Thursday, Mike and I went to “The Path to Agility” conference which covered methodologies, structural changes, and tools that can be used to increase efficiency in that development process.

One of the focuses of the conference was a framework called Scrum.   Scrum was introduced in the 1990’s but hasn’t been widely implemented until recently. It is a framework designed to increase the speed, efficiency, and quality of project development while minimizing the cost and risk. This framework is vastly different than the traditional development frameworks. Scrum realizes that the development process is complicated and unpredictable and its focus is on flexibility and productivity over linear development. The project is broken down into smaller iterations known as sprints, where the team plans, builds, tests, reviews, then deploys after each sprint.  When a sprint is finished, the project is reviewed to see what adjustments need to be made which gives the project added flexibility.

Other than Scrum, the conference also covered topics such as agile testing, transferring the company to use agile, and ways to attract and hire agile developers.  I learned why some companies have not dedicated themselves to switching to the agile way, and what challenges exist in this transition. This conference also exposed me to a number of different practices and ideas being used throughout other companies.  When a company changes to agile, many areas of the company from management methods down to the production environment are altered in order to have a truly agile development process.  When viewing the results of companies that have made this change, it is apparent that the rewards far outweigh the risk.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 12:43 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.