A Series of Tubes

Whenever we procure services from a vendor (e.g. remodeling a kitchen), we are faced with overcoming the fear of potentially spending a lot of money without getting a successful result at the end. Once the project begins, our visibility into project progress is then limited to what we learn from the vendor’s status reports, and what we see as visible progress. Unfortunately, we never really know if the vendor is painting a rosier picture than reality might reflect. Also, it’s often the case that visible progress is not easy to come by, especially in software projects where the work product is so abstract.

So our visibility goes down, our stress levels increase, and we begin to spend our time standing on the vendor’s head nervously polling “how are we doing?” every day or two. Since Jonah Group is a services organization, we understand this dynamic all too well, and use two major strategies to prevent this from happening.

The first is Iterative Development and Delivery of vertically integrated pieces of the system (stories or use cases). I won’t go into this very deeply, because it is a well-developed, well-understood technique at the centre of modern Agile software development methods. Essentially this reduces risk by delivering working pieces of functionality early and often so that visibility into progress is re-established at discrete points in time (typically the end of each code Sprint).

The second is the process of continuously collecting answers to the question “How much time do you have remaining on this task?” from each of the team members. But how?

Article No. 49

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written by

Jeremy Chan

category

New and Noteworthy

published

November 28, 2011

Site Launch!

Jonah underwent a rebranding exercise in the summer, and emerged with our new mantra “The Beauty of Custom”. Our new brand positions brings our newly developed interactive capabilities to the forefront of our brand, and emphasizes the competitive advantage that only a custom solution can bring. This change is also concurrent with major updates to our integrated development methodology. We can’t wait to apply our new standards and processes. We think our clients will like them too!