Twice a year we have product releases with new features and functionality. While this isn’t going to change, the methodology of how we work towards these product releases will.
Why are we going agile?
With the financial services industry constantly changing, our solution (and the planning of it) needs to be able to adapt to these shifts. This means that we can better meet our clients’ demands and support their business strategy.
Agile development provides us with the opportunity to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. Under the waterfall model, we had to assume that every requirement of the project had been identified before any design or coding occurred. By going agile, we can work more “iteratively” and “incrementally” to ensure everything we work on is just as relevant for our clients at the start of the development phase, as the finish.
On top of the fact that our internal goals match the agile deliverables, there are four key reasons why we are going agile.
Faster time-to-market
By giving more power to our agile teams, they are able to better prioritize and deliver based on what provides most business value to our clients, with a key measure being the completion and delivery of features.
Better quality
To continue delivering high quality products to our customers, the agile teams will establish close cooperation between business analysts, product managers, developers, testers and technical writers who all contribute to delivering the product. By shortening the feedback loop, it is possible to identify and fix defects earlier and faster, ensuring that the end product is even better.
Increased productivity
Our agile teams work closely together and are empowered, self-organized and cross-functional, increasing productivity with more efficient collaboration and communication and minimizing the amount of context-switching for team members.
More engaged employees
Agile is an extremely dynamic and team-focused approach to working. This means that silos are broken down, and we are building close knit collaborative teams that can work on new products, and quickly (and regularly) see the results of their efforts.
Hopping on the Agile Release Train (ART)
SimCorp going agile shouldn’t come as a surprise. At a live poll we took at our recent Global Technical Seminar (GTS), I asked our clients whether they were using the agile methodology in their internal development organizations, 70% said they were.
We have already started the first agile release train, features from which will be visible in Release 6.1 in early 2017. This is an exciting new step for the Product Development team and we’re looking forward to sharing the results with you.
