Lean Wisdom seminar 13 Feb 2008 Per Spilling Principal Consultant, Objectware

How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

1 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Front-end system

Back-end system

Delivered on time and on budget using Scrum

2 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

High level requirements and initial GUI prototypes

Insurance back-end system configuration and customization

GUI design refinement Front-end application & back-end services development

Mar ’06 May ’06 Jun ’06 12 Dec ’06

Insurance back-end system service provider selection

6 Oct ’06

Agile / Scrum practices all the way through

• Co-located cross functional development team

• Complete project backlog created at the beginning of the project

• Estimated and prioritised items

• GUI prototyping before coding

• Daily stand-up meetings

• 3-week sprints with demo

• Reflection meetings

• Empowered team

• Continuous integration and automated testing

3 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Customer fully commited to agile/lean development process

• Domain experts co-located with developers

• Key stakeholders involved in the project on a daily basis

• Office space and optimised for agile development

• High performance PCs with large screens

• Agile tools for project management and knowledge sharing

•  Jira, Confluence wiki, ScrumWorks

4 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Largely greenfield project

5 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Storebrand Skade web application

Internal Backend System 1

Storebrand CMS

Storebrand Web Services

Insurance Backend System

Insurance Web Services

Internal Backend System 2

External SaaS provider

Lightweight architecture using leading open source frameworks

Eliminate waste in the development process

6 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Sprint planning

Turn prototypes into html

Turn html into working application

screens

Sprint demo 3 week sprint

Write requirements

and GUI prototypes

Prototype testing

Product backlog

Sprint backlog

Initial PB created when project starts

Screen design is finished before coding starts

Requirements expert leads specification work

Prototype GUI and perform user testing before programming

7 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Final design by IXD

One team was off-site – communication and integration issues

8 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

How to ensure effective communication and solve integration issues?

Solution: One developer from our team would join the team in Denmark for part of the week, over a period of 7 weeks, until integration issues where solved

Other challenges

• Very short development period

•  Long days, some pragmatic choices had to be made

• Project team wanted to use latest and greatest frameworks and tools

• Sometimes in conflict with established Storebrand standards

• Try to find a balance between what is the most effective for the project and what is best for onward system maintenance

• Some tools where only used for the duration of the project

9 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months

Conclusion

• ”Scrum all the way” can achieve very significant productivity improvements compared to traditional methods

• Using Agile/Scrum method means more time spent creating business functionality

• Agile/Scrum provides just as good, if not better, control than traditional methods

10 How to develop an insurance webshop in 6 months