Marco Cerri - 5 October, 2018 - 3 ’ read

Tech inside: Agile software development (Part 1).

Take a need. Make a code.

See, here’s the thing: when something in your company works properly, gives you excellent results and has been built with effort, you would jealously keep it hidden. You believe it’s your competitive advantage, the “know-how” you want to protect.
In this particular case, though, I think it’s a duty to share it, so that it can be an inspiration for those who, like us, always seek improvement and aim for success.
(And let’s face it, it’s also a great story to tell! 😁 )

Tech inside: Agile software development (Part 1).

The point is that a time has come when, thanks to the continuous improvement and development of our product portfolio over the years, the number of customers and the complexity of the projects has soared.
By then, our production process could no longer meet the quality and time-to-market requirements we had set ourselves. The increase in support cases was the first indicator that something had to be improved: after that, the difficulty in respecting product roadmap timing has definitely pushed us to change.

I’m talking about the software production process in Imagicle and how the introduction of the Agile-Scrum methodology has given us a significant boost.
Let’s see how.

The key idea: keep in mind the wider community of your customers.

Here at the software development department, we always create new functionalities with the intent to make them available for all possible users, all our customers.
In fact, the needs we try to answer and translate into code come very often from individual customers, but their realization follows the principle that all our customers must be able to take advantage of the new functionality.
 
Recently, for example, to accommodate the request of one of our partners for a project in the Netherlands, we have enabled the vocalization of the position in the queue and made it available within Imagicle Advanced Queueing for the next release of Winter 2019.
 
From the outset, it’s important to realize what will be a useful innovation not for one, but for all customers’ daily work.

The journey from a traditional development methodology to Agile, up to Agicle.

With a vast audience all over the world, the day we release a new version of Imagicle UCX Suite on the market, and the days to follow, are the most challenging. The efforts of the last period are put to the test, we all hope that nothing has escaped our analyses, and, above all, that what we have achieved is simple and effective for everyone.

During this process of continuous improvement, the radical change that has brought Imagicle a significant benefit in terms of quality, stability, and forecasting of production times it was the adoption of the Agile methodology.
Soon enough, according to our implementation, within Imagicle it took the name of “Agicle“.

Such well-known method, designed for development teams, is suitable for those who must meet needs that change during the implementation of the solution and face unpredictable challenges.
Its strong point is to allow developers to maintain fast and predictable times while ensuring the highest possible quality; a method that is often only partially adopted, but which requires radical change.

Tech inside: Agile software development (Part 1).
In the Agile methodology, requirements and solutions evolve rapidly in close collaboration between the development team and the end user.
However, with a large-scale product like the Imagicle UCX Suite, it would have been very difficult to have our customers talk to the R&D team. 
That’s why we had to figure out how to solve this problem…

Don't miss the next post.

Marco Cerri will talk about the importance of a crucial figure in the interaction between the development plan and the final customer, the Product Owner.

He’ll explain how to break the development work into small increments and how to keep product quality intact through continuous automatic testing and a development strategy capable of responding flexibly to change.

Don’t waste your talent. Discover Agi(c)le.

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