How many of you tuned into the 2014 PGA Championship two weekends ago? The final tournament of the PGA season was nothing less than a theatrical showdown between greats like Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, and Ricky Fowler among others. Having spent years training, chipping, putting, driving, and striving toward winning the next big major, these golfers are arguably some of the most agile athletes in the league.
What is Agile?
In the software development space, Agile is a method for managing requirements, design, testing, and deployment in fixed-iterations (often referred to as sprints) versus the traditional “waterfall” approach. The “waterfall” approach assumes every requirement is accurate and accounted for prior to actually designing and coding the system. The biggest risk with this method is delivering a solution that’s built without considering changes to the environment, such as a new law or business process.
In other words, companies risk spending time and money to build a system end users can’t (or don’t want) to use.
While incremental software development methods can be traced back to 1957, the most common Agile practices today began evolving in the early 1990s. In 2001 a group of 17 software developers got together to discuss the various approaches. This meeting resulted in The Agile Manifesto, which highlights the fundamental principles behind this approach to software development:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Why is it important?
Can you imagine if McIlroy and Mickelson played the 2014 PGA Championship using the “waterfall” approach? It would have been a disaster. As if rain delays and nightfall weren’t reason enough to require quick and effective adjustments to their game plans, the way they came out to play sure did. Between barrages of early birdies, late bogies, a stellar 28-foot putt, and a 508-yard par-4 16th hole, to say they played agile would be a gross understatement. While a great deal of practice, analysis, and strategy go into preparing for an event like the PGA Championship (yet another understatement), nothing is certain. The weather, the players, the crowd, the pressure; anything goes.
We feel the same way about software development at TechShare.
What does Agile look like at TechShare?
The TechShare.Prosecutor team is on par with its Agile approach to software development. Made up of experts in project management, business analysis, training, programming, and quality control, this team works with the counties to deliver components of the system in sprints.
Another key point worth mentioning: whether it’s a round of golf or developing a system, communication is key. Because Agile methods rely less on heavy documentation and more on user feedback about the software, generally there’s more opportunity to tweak the product along the way. Typically, the traditional “waterfall” approach doesn’t lend itself to this kind of flexibility.
The TechShare.Prosecutor team obtains user feedback via email, collaboration tools like JIRA and Confluence, and through meetings with a variety of user groups. The meetings are particularly beneficial in a number of ways, including:
- Administration of the application
- Reporting and Business Intelligence needs
- Review of the training material and content development
- Demonstrations and review of new functionality
If we think back to our golf analogy, these types of activities are what happens in between strokes. The team discusses what’s working well, what’s not, and whether or not we need to adjust our strategy before we grab a club and take another swing.
Through the Agile approach we recognize that we can’t get it right the first time, but with an emphasis on user feedback and a rapid response to change, the solution evolves with the needs of each county more flexibly.
Is the TechShare.Prosecutor system live?
So far, Dallas County is live on the TechShare.Prosecutor application. There have been two releases of the system since the project began in December 2012. Midland County will go live at the end of September. Tarrant County plans to implement the system in early December, and Travis County is planning for a February or March 2015 Go-Live date.
In the meantime, the team continues to develop the system in two-week sprints while meeting with user groups to build a county-owned Prosecutor Case Management System to facilitate the business activities of the County Attorney and District Attorney offices.
Melissa Hicks, Marketing and Communications Manager