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The Big Move: How We Migrated Core Applications to the Cloud

By Acácio Porta Nova on March 19, 2012 12:54 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
For the last couple of months, it seemed a few of our core applications weren't behaving as well as they should... Some applications were running a bit slow, and we experienced connectivity problems related to our ISP.

This was serious because these are core systems running on top of the Agile Platform, and include our website, our community, our partner network, our product management tool, and a host of other internal applications.

Since responsiveness and availability are two fundamental traits of a great app, we had to do something about it. We decided to move our infrastructure to the cloud, in particular to Amazon EC2. And because these were core apps, we had to do it with minimum downtime and guaranteeing all the needed accesses.

The old infrastructure
The infrastructure we wanted to move to Amazon was made up of two separate OutSystems production environments -- we decided not to move the development and QA environments. These environments and their applications were built using a Service Oriented Architecture to communicate with each other, and to integrate with third-party apps like Pardot and Salesforce.

Another part of the challenge was that these systems are used by internal OutSystems' applications, deployed in different infrastructures -- including business-critical integrations with the R&D process. This raised some security concerns and some challenges on how to keep supporting these integrations with minimal changes to the architecture.

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The new setup
Since the machines about to be replaced were near retirement, and because in Amazon we can add machines as needed, we decreased the number of servers from 5 front-ends to 3. We have an additional machine with SQL Server and, at the time of writing, all machines are m1.large (2CPU, 5 Amazon ECU, 7.5GB RAM). To distribute load between the Amazon front-ends, we are using Amazon Load Balancer.

Preparing for the big move
In order to perform the move, we used an approach similar to the hot-standby approach suggested to our Agile Platform customers. The idea is to setup an infrastructure on the cloud, and use the disaster recovery option to move control to this new infrastructure. For this, we had to:

  1. Make sure all users were accessing the in-house systems from the outside network, just to make sure that everything that was needed was in fact available. This was good to identify certain content that needed to be accessed via HTTPS, for security reasons;
  2. We had to set up a database mirror for the SQL Server database. This was a big step, considering we moved 120Gb to Amazon -- a 2 day transfer! And since our internal infrastructure kept working, by the time it was done we had an extra gigabyte to move. Also, being two remote installations of SQL Server, we had to setup a secure mirror with certificate authentication -- which has its own tricks as well;
  3. We then installed the front-end servers in the cloud, and set them up to connected to the in-house database. This was easy, since OutSystems already provides Amazon images. The trickier bit was to ensure a secure connection with our internal systems, something we achieved using OpenVPN;
  4. Finally, we tested to make sure everything was working. We used some automated test scripts, and took the chance to identify dependencies with internal systems. To fix these dependency issues, we had to move some components back to the internal datacenter, and connect everything using webservices on top of HTTPS. Fortunately, this is really easy to do with the Agile Platform as it makes building webservices and delivering a service oriented architecture easy and fast! The only thing we couldn't test was performance... after all, the database was still in our datacenter, 3 thousand miles from the front-ends.

Pull the switch!
With all the preparation done, it was time to go full cloud. Here's what we did:

  1. We started by turning off the in-house systems. No problem here, just had to put an unavailable page and stop the OutSystems' Agile Platform and IIS.
  2. Next, we brought the cloud database server up. We were a bit worried with the time it would take to resync our SQL Server mirror after the rotation, but it only took about a minute. It took less than 5 minutes to have everything ready and to configure.
  3. After that, we reconfigured the Agile Platform to use the cloud database. No problems there, we just had to launch the configuration tool, modify the database settings, and restart the platform.
  4. Finally, we had to change the DNS servers to point to the new infrastructure location.

The results
In the end, we definitely achieved our goal: Our core applications are running faster, and in time we'll be able to measure how connectivity improved since moving to the cloud.

It's also amazing how fast we were able to make the move. The procedure took 4 hours, but it could've easily taken 30 minutes if it wasn't for DNS. DNS ended up being the big bottleneck on the whole process, due to the time it takes to propagate. This is something we'll need to do differently, if we repeat this operation in the future.

In the end, the work was made a lot simpler thanks to the Agile Platform. Not only because it's totally prepared for these redundancy server scenarios, but also because it's so easy to change configurations and have everything running with the new settings in no-time.

Maybe even more important, the Agile Platform made it fast to split the components we wanted to keep in-house, and glue everything together with an SOA architecture. Being able to be extremely fast really opens a world of possibilities!

If you want to learn more about the cloud and how the Agile Platform can help you, click here to visit our cloud page.

Save money and deliver ahead of schedule: The SATA story

By Mike Jones on November 10, 2011 11:47 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
GrupoSataLogo.pngI was excited to read a story in PM Network profiling our client, SATA International, an airline headquartered in Portugal. The article highlights how SATA - using OutSystems' Agile Platform - built a custom airport operational management system after the packaged software vendor behind their previous application came to them at renewal time presenting a significant price increase.

"Buy vs. build" is a typical issue we hear from Agile Platform users, and as the PM Network article points out, the answer for SATA was "build" after they realized they could reduce costs and improve organizational efficiency by building their own application. For SATA, the airport operational management system is a critical application that needs to be fully integrated with SATA's operational systems. And after a short experience working with OutSystems' Agile Platform, SATA was certain they had the right platform to build their application .

As SATA CIO Paulo Ornelas said in the PM Network article:

"Even having this limited experience, the success of our first agile deployment instilled confidence that both the methodology and the technology would effectively support the project delivery."

Once SATA kicked off this project using the Agile Platform, they were able to deliver the application even quicker than expected. Paulo Ornealas told PM Network:

"We actually issued the final release a month early, with an even higher than- promised level of functionality."

And at the end of the project, SATA's decision to build its own custom application was validated, with substantial financial savings over what the packaged software vendor originally quoted them for their renewal:

"Financially, we were able to realize significant savings in both capital expenditure and operating expense," Mr. Ornelas says. The final solution came in at only 15 percent of the total cost proposed by the vendor, and it was totally tailored to the organization.

Congratulations to SATA on their successful projects! To read more about the success they've had with Agile Platform, check out their full case study.

Continue reading Save money and deliver ahead of schedule: The SATA story.

Education and RAD PaaS - Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

By Terence Fugazzi on August 16, 2011 5:20 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
IT professionals in the education space have a peanut_butter_and_jelly.pngdifficult task facing them - they have to meet the demands of students, teachers and administrative support staff with what typically amounts to a shoestring budget.

In the past few years, this has meant relying heavily on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions that, while inexpensive, tend to be difficult to integrate with existing school resources and rarely meet all the needs of a district. On the other hand, custom-developed applications can meet all of a school IT administrator's needs but are something of a pipe dream, thanks to the personnel, budget and equipment requirements.

This is all changing, however, thanks to the cloud and, in particular, rapid application development (RAD) Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) - a category which is defined by the flexibility and power of the Agile Platform.

For an example, take Faith Academy. A private school with brick-and-mortar locations as well as a virtual curriculum, Faith's vice president of IT, Dan Stueck, was faced with having to upgrade several important applications with a very small budget. Rather than turning to SaaS, Dan went with the Agile Platform, leading to a highly effective partnership in the cloud. You can read the full article at THE Journal.

Our own Mike Jones also offered up his take on RAD PaaS in schools at EdTech Digest - check out Mike's Q&A for great insights into what schools can expect from the cloud in the future and why custom app dev is the future when it comes to school IT.

What about you? What impact do you see RAD PaaS having on your school or your business?

From Lotus Notes and Beyond - An Agile Migration Story

By Gonçalo Gaiolas on September 29, 2010 11:16 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
I wanted to share a recent experience I had with one of our newest customers. We'll keep the name undisclosed for now, but these guys are a truly global company and a recognized leader in their industry. 

When we first met the customer's team, they were faced with the challenge of migrating away from antiquated technologies and hand coding into a platform that would allow their team to respond to business needs very fast but also with high quality and scalability. The team had evaluated tens of alternatives to achieve this goal and eventually decided on the Agile Platform as a technology that would allow them to achieve their time to market goals without sacrificing quality or scalability. 

I had the pleasure to be involved with this process from the beginning and on my last visit I was asked to help them define their migration strategy from the older technologies like Lotus Notes into a modern, web-enabled platform like OutSystems. Now for the challenge: the team has been very prolific over the years and had well over a thousand Notes applications that need to be migrated, discontinued, or rewritten from scratch. The big question behind this process was clear - what is the most efficient way to determine which applications go where?

What goes where?
With this many applications it was almost impossible to understand the entire portfolio usage - let alone determine each application's fate. Luckily, the team had been disciplined and kept track of useful information like application purpose, templates used, and change requests.  Using an Excel file with all this information, the team built an OutSystems application in 5 minutes using IntelliWarp. The application was then used to determine a conversion score for each application, taking into consideration five important factors:

  1. Type of application - Applications that were primarily discussion based were deemed more adequate for other technologies, like Sharepoint. OutSystems applications are typically high-value, highly customized applications that you just can't get out of the box;
  2. User population - Targeting  reasonably small groups of users seemed like a sound strategy to initiate a technology deployment;
  3. Usage patterns - Because value comes from usage, the team decided that highly intense usage would be a good scoring facet for the applications; 
  4. Development team - To ensure knowledge transfer happened smoothly, the old applications that were originally developed by team members staffing the new OutSystems dev group were preferred;
  5. Rate of change - The OutSystems Platform is all about change - the team wanted applications that are alive and evolving, with constant requests for new features or tweaks to existing ones. 

Taking into account the above factors, our "secret sauce" conversion score algorithm yielded a migration score that determined the benefit of migrating an application to the OutSystems Platform.  Because this was all done automatically and in just a couple of hours, target applications were defined and discussed much earlier than they would have been by any other means. 

Next, the team took advantage of the 'speed to change' capability of the Agile Platform by extending the new portfolio management application to record the proposed migration strategy (destination platform) when it came time to replace each old application. 

Curious to see what the new portfolio management tool looks like? The screenshot below shows the application (with data erased for privacy). 

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By using the speed of the Agile Platform, combined with technical skill and a healthy dose of pragmatism, the team was able to create the new portfolio application that helped them optimize a fundamental process in their work and bring more value, faster! - This is the essence of agility. 

What about you? Do you have any similar success stories to share with us?

Van Ameyde wins BPM and SOA Innovation Award... with OutSystems!

By Rodrigo Coutinho on September 23, 2010 3:03 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Logo_VA_group.png
Back in 2008, Van Ameyde - an international insurance claims manager from the Netherlands - came to the conclusion it needed to optimize their claims handling process in order to provide customers with the best service levels in the market.

To achieve this goal, a new project was launched to build an entirely new claims handling system called ECHO: European Claims Handling Optimization. Given the complexity and risk of such an ambitious project, it's only natural that Van Ameyde decided to move forward using Agile Methodologies.

As far as technology goes, it was also clear that using standard software wouldn't cut it. Not only does Van Ameyde have very specific business requirements, it also needed a technology that would allow them to continuously modify and align the ECHO solution with the business. At this point they decided to move forward with the Agile Platform.


Once the ECHO application went live, the business immediately saw the optimization results in the company's claim processing business. In particular, the business witnessed a 30% reduction in the time required to resolve a claim. Not only that, ECHO also quickly became a powerful sales and market expansion tool, allowing Van Ameyde to streamline its ability to open new branches to less than one week, a three to four-fold improvement over the old system.

On top of that, and even though the ECHO application supports 16 different countries with unique claim handling requirements, 12 different languages, and 6 different currencies, Van Ameyde now has unprecedented flexibility to customize claims processing for new customers, something that was not possible with the old system.

All this hard work and the amazing results achieved by Van Ameyde and the ECHO system were rewarded this week with the 2010 'Business Agility and Process Optimization Enabled by BPM and SOA' case study award, proving that vision together with technology can go a long way!

Congrats to Van Ameyde and the OutSystems delivery team!


I LUV Agile Platform: a customer story

By Maysoon A on August 3, 2010 4:22 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
ILUV-1.jpgAt OutSystems, we love our product. We honestly believe that it is something that truly makes the lives of IT people better. Which, in turn, has made our customers more successful. We've seen it work over and over and we try and tell everyone we can about it, but it sometimes sounds too good to be true. However, the word is spreading among the developers and we're seeing more and more people try it out for themselves.  
And we love that.

What we love even more is when we hear from you, our customers, about how much you love the Agile Platform too. This note is from one such customer who I was emailing with about being a reference for an upcoming press launch - and I just feel compelled to share it.

"I live and breathe OutSystems.

I love it... I wish I had discovered OutSystems years ago...

Let me give you a little background...

I was in the midst of creating the current application we are working on (in a competing tool,) when it came across my desk that I needed to create another system for our new online school that's scheduled to open in the Fall. Well, I needed to make this one happen fast, and it would have taken far too long to create in the existing tool.  So, I started searching the web for a faster way. I downloaded and tried two other products before I found OutSystems - both were completely unsatisfactory. They did not give me full control. Then, after probably another month, I stumbled across the OutSystems web page, and I'm very happy to have found it. With the Agile Platform I get complete control over the application, and can see and work with the code visually.  I was able to create a live application for the online school in no time.  The Agile Platform is so good that after creating the application for the online school, I wanted to scrap my current application for our brick and mortar schools and immediately started development for our brick and mortar application on the OutSystems platform.  The speed and ease of programming is what it's all about.

So, I am glad to tell anyone about OutSystems. I think its a great company, great people, great platform.

Thanks
Dan
Dan Stueck, vice president of IT for Faith Educational Ministries.

If you don't believe us - believe Dan. We think the Agile Platform is truly a better way to build, change and manage your web business applications. 

OK, getting off my soapbox now and on with the day ;)

Have you used the Agile Platform? What do you think of it?

XDx - Using Agile Development to Support Scientific Research Studies

By Maysoon A on May 4, 2010 2:33 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
xdxAlloMap.jpgThe New York Times and the Wall Street Journal recently ran  articles on an important new blood test, called AlloMap, which was developed by XDx, a cutting-edge biopharma based in California. What's AlloMap, and why is it making headlines? From the New York Times article:

A blood test that analyzes genetic activity could let heart transplant patients avoid many of the invasive and uncomfortable biopsies now used to monitor whether their immune systems are rejecting their new organs, doctors said in a study published Thursday.
The study found that patients who were monitored for rejection using the blood test had outcomes roughly equivalent to those of patients who were given frequent heart biopsies.
It's an impressive development in the area of cardiovascular medicine, and according to one doctor quoted in the article, XDx's AlloMap "will cause a paradigm shift in how we monitor for rejection."

So what does this have to do with agile development or OutSystems?

XDx used the OutSystems Agile Platform to create the business application it now uses to track and analyze the diagnostic tests required in clinical studies. The application replaced XDx's former Excel-based and manually intensive processes, increasing their ability to study clinical data in a timely manner. Using Agile Platform, XDx delivered its first application to business users in only 6 weeks - including one week of fine-tuning. XDx's story is only one example of the kind of applications that are being built using Agile Platform, but we think it's a pretty remarkable one.



If you want to learn more about how XDx turned to Agile Platform to meet the ever-changing requirements they were receiving from their scientists, check out the case study, or watch the above clip of Stefan Meier, Principal Software Architect in XDx's Information Sciences Department. You can also read about Stefan's presentation at NextStep in which he discussed the XDx experience of introducing Agile.


Agile Application LifeCycle Management - A Travel Case Study

By Mike Jones on November 10, 2009 9:34 PM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
MAX_RAYNER_s.jpgWe were all very excited to hear one of our customers, Max Rayner, speak at the recent ALM Expo on how he and his team built and delivered the www.fly.com system using an agile approach. If you're not familiar with it, this is an internet application that's openly available and was built using Agile methodologies, SCRUM techniques and an Agile ALM toolset.
 
Max is the CTO of Travelzoo - a travel publisher with 18 million subscribers and fly.com is an online app that helps you find the exact match to your air travel needs. During the webcast Max discussed the problem space, their agile approach, the innovative metasearch engine, how they managed a distributed team, challenges, key learnings and reasons for their success.travelzoo agile approach.jpgWith all that said, I can't really do the webcast justice in this blog as there was SO much great information shared - but you can:

1) download the webcast presentation slides.pdf and listen to the podcast

2) view the full recording of the webcast here (unfortunately, you will need to register but its free and painless.)

3) or, you can download the podcast of the presentation here and listen in your own time.

BTW, the recordings include a great Q&A session that I would highly recommend listening to!  Here are some stats Max shared on the fly.com agile project:

Duration
  • Expected: 28 weeks  Actual: 32 weeks
  • Number of Sprints: 14 (including a tuning sprint,) Number of Demos: 12
  • 250 change requests (using Agile Platform Embedded Change Technology)
  • 4 week tuning sprint & 4 versions released during tuning
The Team
  • Business Sponsor: Chief Technology Officer
  • 1 Engagement Manager, 1 Delivery Manager, 3-5 Developers & 1 QA
  • 7 Key Users
Technology
  • OutSystems Agile Platform used for: requirements gathering, design, integration, component assembly, version control & configuration management, deployment & performance management
  • Over 20 integrations w/ databases, third party systems etc
  • .NET environment.

I believe this case study to be a great testament to the Agile development approach; the project achievements speak for themselves:

1. Fly.com is able to handle a sustained load of 40,000 searches per hour with 99.8% availability

2. Fly.com functionality delivered with less cost & faster than competitive solutions
  
3. 6 months to deliver working system that was stress tested, and then new features added to meet & beat the competition

4. Less than 1 year to develop & release what competitors had taken 2+ years to achieve

5. Compares prices from hundreds of airlines & online travel sites with just one user search.  Integration of 12+ distinct information providers in real-time, aggregating all the data received, stored & made available asynchronously

6. Links to hundreds of external sites with over 30 types of parameter formatting & integration methods.

What were your major take-away's' from Max's webcast?  Have you come across other case studies of major applications that have been built with Agile methods?  Are these Agile case studies useful to you and should we publish more here?
 


Driving Agile Success - A CIO's Mandate

By Mike Jones on October 20, 2009 1:49 PM | 6 Comments | No TrackBacks
The challenge we see in many Enterprise IT shops is that it is hard to get everyone across the business who touches application development 'on board' with an agile approach.  In this blog post I want to share how the CIO of one of our customers has set guidelines which help drive agile project delivery across the business.
cio-mandate2.jpg 
The customer is a large Portuguese food distribution and consumer goods manufacturing company, with an international presence.  With nearly 25,000 employees they are used to having huge IT projects, involving multiple departments with complex requirements, large budgets and long timelines. 

Before agile, many of these projects were delivered late, over budget and in some cases actually failed.  In 2005 they became an OutSystems customer; embracing the Agile Platform and an agile methodology. As they matured in their agile practices, the CIO saw the value and today they operate under the CIO's mandate that only projects scoped with a timeline of less than three months and a budget under 300K will be approved.

What happened before the CIO mandate was put in place?  Here's what they told us:

1. They would spend two to three months in meetings, aligning all opinions in order to create a huge requirements document;

2. When they finally started developing the systems the business team had disappeared and in most cases forgotten about the project;

3. By the time the project was ready to be tested the key users had changed, the business had changed and the project delivery team immediately entered into a lengthy negotiation phase to reconcile what was delivered versus what the business really needed.

This customer states that with the agile methodology and their new CIO mandate they improved the success rate of their projects in several ways:

1. The business team is more motivated and involved as they are able to see how the projects are progressing on a regular basis;

2. The business gets to be more responsible for the decisions that shape the project direction because they see and constantly test the application;

3. The business and IT avoid the costly, wasteful exercise of building complex requirements documents because they now fully realize that they can never document every detail in a specification;

4. From very early on in the project, IT can see if the project is really what the company needs and identify any mis-matches quickly to reduce the amount of time, dollars and resources that might be wasted.

5. Even for big projects, Agile methodology is used - and forces the team to split the project into phases. This exercise divides the scope into smaller, manageable projects with incremental releases and decreased risk.

So, both for this CIO and many others, we are finding that an agile approach to application development really helps increase project success rate and reduce risks.  Even in a company like this one that has complex application needs, lots of departments and bureaucracy - agile really works! 

What are the technical leaders in your company doing to help drive agile project delivery?  Or, what would you like to see them doing? 

Share their rules, guidelines and mandates along with your ideas!  


NextStep'09 presentations are now available!

By Maysoon A on April 30, 2009 3:05 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Presentations1.jpgAs promised, the customer, partner and OutSystems presentations that were given at the NextStep '09 conference are now available online.

These include great case studies on Agile development, Agile technical tips and tricks, and discussions on the future of agile, adoption and business value.

 

Also, if you have not yet completed the Agile Adoption Survey - it only takes 2 minutes and we would greatly appreciate your input!

 

Introducing Agile: Hidden Benefits (and some challenges)

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 3:47 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Our next presentation was by Stefan Meier, Associate Director, Software Development, Information Sciences Department at XDx. Xdx is a biotech company that relies on software and technology for their Molecular Diagnostic Technology. They assess patients who have had a heart transplant and whether they are likely to accept or reject the transplant. They are also working on a clinical study to provide the data to find correlations between genetics and pathology in disease/immune system-related areas.

xdx.jpg
 
Prior to Agile & OutSystems - the development team was 5 developers and 2 SQA and 1 project manager using classical waterfall methods - with 3 Web-based EDC systems for clinical trials, 2 internally developed LIMS applications (1 FDA regulated), several custom query/reporting/maintenance applications and Excel spreadsheets for reporting.

One key problem Stefan highlighted was that each member of the development team used their own chosen environment - Java, PHP, .NET and VB! This degree of complexity and development approach caused lower levels of productivity than they would have liked - for example before OutSystems and Agile, a project that should have taken 4 months took 1 year to deliver.
 
With all the requirements of the business and limited ability to increase the size of the development team, the Xdx IT team decided to create a unified software architecture using SOA and deliver new applications while reducing maintenance costs and developing reusable components.

One of the missing pieces of the puzzle turned out to be OutSystems and the Agile approach. They decided to choose a platform and not the method first...(a little different to most as they did not choose the methodology first). Several reasons - including the need for a rapid development platform to keep up with the needs of their scientists. Another nice side-effect of this choice was that it meant Xdx could side-step the platform wars - and introduced a new option - OutSystems and its Agile Platform.
 
After 15 months and many applications built with the Agile Platform - Stefan noted were several effects:

  • Probably the best benefit: A new way to interact with the business users, because with each demo the users could SEE the app as it was being developed, even in the very early stages...and the tangible results (even after the first sprint) helped build user's confidence and adoption of the idea of Agile within the company.

  • The biggest challenge was unanticipated: resistance of the Agile Platform within the development team itself. The resistance was because of perceived platform restrictions and potential skills deterioration. Stefan said that the second issue is probably more difficult to address - and they did it by enabling the developers to move around different projects. Stefan shared that the "Platform restriction" objection often went away as the developers got hands-on with the platform, although criticism was dependent on the profile of the developer. Stefan categorized the profiles as "The Programmers" who were OK with the Platform because they could get so much more done, the "Hacker Genius" who writes entire apps with 1 line of Perl code - who are likely complain the most and may or may not ever be a convert. And, finally the "Theorist" who just thinks the very idea of using a "platform" is just wrong - they may change their mind after getting hands-on with the technology but not always.

  • Integrating the 2-man QA team with the Dev team - the QA team was classically trained on the waterfall method and FDA approval requires rigorous testing. They tried combining the 2 processes - that didn't really work. So, they tried handing over pieces of the app for testing periodically - this worked to a degree but was uncomfortable for the testers since they didn't like testing a product that was incomplete.The third try was to integrate a member of the QA team with the rest of the team from the beginning of the project and they were able to start testing in the sprints...they were then much happier since they knew about all the decisions that were made during development process. Also - the testers were able to provide important input on how to improve system testability during development. The team's next step is to introduce an automated testing tool for regression testing - making QA even happier!

  • "Agile IS as valid a process as waterfall method in a regulated environment" since documentation is being developed along with the application - however it's important to keep the documentation at the appropriate level of details (e.g. patient care require very detailed documentation). Design reviews are the other requirement - and each demo is used as a formal design review - therefore implicitly fulfilling this requirement through the development process.
 
After 15 months with Agile & OutSystems it is now the de facto standard for building web applications at Xdx. They have built 3 apps (7 production releases) and around 5-6 reusable services. A great success so far!

They are also a step closer to having a unified software infrastructure with reusable services. They have shortened turn-around time from request to delivery - and providing high quality and high impact applications.

Last but not least - the new architecture, approach and tools have enabled consistent data across all divisions through integrated applications - a very important aspect in the clinical trial process!

Have you had any experience of combining Agile and Waterfall methods? What did you think of the XDx team's solution to the QA challenge?
 

Launching a New Company in a Fast and Agile Way

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 3:12 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Miguel Barreto, CEO of Home Energy spoke to us next on "Launching a New Company in a Fast and Agile Way" Home Energy is a new company that's part of the Martifer, a Portuguese renewable group. Home Energy was established in May 2008 with a goal of being a market leader in a new space opened up by new regulations related to Energy Certification and Microgeneration (small photovoltaic panels for home use) for the domestic housing market. January 2009 was when the market was going to take off and Home Energy needed to be ready to support a 200,000 housing market.

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A little explanation: new domestic home sales require an energy certification on the Energy Class of their home and measures/recommendations that can be taken for improving energy efficiency. E.g. solar panels, window types and insulation. The Energy Class is dependent how much energy a house requires to keep it comfortable as compared to established benchmarks.

The big challenge was to be ready for a January 2009 launch with a company that was started in May 2008! The Home Energy business plan and strategy relied on strong technical support and had a goal of having a live system in place by October 2008, with just 3 months for development.
 
Miguel described the Home Energy system where a client has to call the call center (or real estate agent partners send in clients through the website) - a team of 50 field agents/consultants are scheduled throughout Portgual to visit the client homes and assess their Energy Class. This information is uploaded to the servers and the experts at home office execute the process to establish the Energy Class - customers then pay for the assessment online, at which point the team is able to make the home's Energy Certification available.
 
While other potential vendors said they could not address all of Home Energy's requirements within the timeframe - the OutSystems Partner Reditus proposal using the OutSystems Agile Platform was chosen because of its ability to address the aggressive timetable, develop rapidly and change while the systems was in production - as new business requirements came up.
 
Although Miguel was initially skeptical on the flexibility of the tool and how easy it would be to change things -he was very pleased with how it worked in practice. He felt that the multiple sprint approach enabled the business team to get a really good feel for the application as it was being developed -allowing them to make improvements while it was being built and ensure it addressed their needs.

Miguel showed a number of very cool screenshots of their complete application - including  integration with GPS systems for home location and aerial pictures of the house; the ability for consultants to draw on house maps, and assuming enough information...almost automatic generation of the certificate for the clients. Built with a team of 8 people in the first 3 months, this fully integrated system went into production on time and Miguel and team were extremely happy with the outcome.

Miguel wrapped up with a set of their key findings:
  1. A good RFP that focused on key user needs was critical - even though things have changed since.  Approx 70% of the original RFP was implemented - the other 30% were "wish list" items that the team realized they didn't really need...and were subsequently replaced by another 50% that came from market changes after the initial system was implemented.
  2. Short rounds (sprints) of demos with key users were extremely important, establishing a good working relationship and interactions between users and technology team.
  3. Flexible tools facilitate and enable entrepreneurial flexibility - a very important point that underlies the overall success of this case study.
  4. "Custom is better and more efficient than standard approaches" - Miguel's past experience with a packaged or standardized approach is that it became very difficult since the package too much functionality than was needed for the business users - but he felt that custom builds were possible without huge expense - even though they meant potential rough starts.
  5. The development team was dedicated to this project and their spirit and proactivity was very important for ultimate success - where they focused on the end result and drove overall success.
This is the second case study where we've heard about how changes in economy or regulation open up new market opportunities - for those who are the most innovative and nimble (the other was Andries Schilt at Main Energie) - are you seeing the same thing happen in your industry? What technologies are you using to take advantage of the opportunities?

E.ON Benelux: Using Agile to Quickly Adapt to Meter Market Changes

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 1:12 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Next up at NextStep - Marteijn Mout who is the project managers of the 'New meter market model' at E.ON Benelux. E.ON is one of Europe's largest Energy providers with over 30 million customers in 30 countries.  E.ON Benelux has around 270,000 customers and they have been a customer of OutSystems since 2004.

eon.jpgThe project that Marteijn talked to us about during this session was to support the new Government regulation which demands that Suppliers will be responsible for the collection and validation of meter data of smart meters from 2009 and for traditional meters from 2010. He shared a great deal of information about how E.ON developed their solution using Agile and working with OutSystems, SAP and other partners.

Describing the team's experience of using OutSystems Agile approach he told us that:
  • They started with 5 iterations (sprints), with a period length of 2 weeks
  • Sprint 6 was added to address new change requests
  • Weekly progress reports with 2 demo's after every sprint and 2 week testing periods after demos
  • Change Management requests were registered in OutSystems Agile Network (OAN), ECT and assumptions documented
Key challenges that the experienced:
  • They were initially skeptical of the OutSystems size and scope estimate for the project - but happy that the results were delivered as expected.
  • Intensive collaboration - Marteijn quipped that "I'm not sure how many emails I received from and sent to the OutSystems team - but there were a LOT. It wasn't bad - but was an indication of the degree of collaboration!"
  • "We had some initial challenges on combining Waterfall and Agile methods - especially in planning - we were lucky that OutSystems' approach was flexible on that front, and we were able to combine planning into a single planning/test plan."
  • The greatest issue was they found was the temptation to keep adding new requirements - and it was important to keep that reigned in where possible.

End results of the project were a success!

  • The Customer Portal and underlying SMDR "engine" meet all requirements and more!
  • OutSystems were a good sparring partner for architectural and functional matters
  • OutSystems were flexible as promised (planning/adaptability)
  • Communication lines efficient, effective and sound - even with a LOT of emails ;)
  • Realistic planning/sizing and no budget overruns
  • The Agile approach and technology is a big success factor for the project!

How are you coping with the amount of inter-team communications that's required by Agile - what tools are you using?


Dynamic Business Applications and Insurance

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 12:22 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
In this NextStep session Pedro Rosa Santos who leads the consulting services team for Keep it Simple, an OutSystems Partner, addressed how Dynamic Business Applications can play a big part in the Insurance industry.

Pedro described the quantum leap experienced in the Insurance industry from 2005-2008 as it tried to deal with market demand for new products, online self service, the need for real-time information exchange with agent & broker channels and the drive to invest in new technology in order to reduce costs. The problem, Pedro explains, is that this has created an extremely complex IT environment for most Insurance companies around the globe - and the goal of building an infrastructure that is responsive to market needs - actually started to have the opposite result - preventing responsiveness!  

kiss.jpgTo address the need for a responsive infrastructure and maintain low TCO - The Keep it Simple team are working with insurance companies to implement a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and build certain aspects of the systems as Dynamic Business Applications. They recommend to the insurance companies they work with (and which is probably applicable to the audience in other industries) the following:

Pedro describes Dynamic Business Applications as applications where you can change business rules or change the front-end extremely rapidly - in a couple of hours or a couple of days. In order to move forward in this way, Pedro recommended the following steps:

  1. Identify a back-office dynamic business application
  2. Migrate business logic and rules that can provide functionality to other services (like portal, CRM or BI)
  3. Portals, product pricing & management + claims management - adapt them to be changed easily, on a dialy basis and delivered to the end-user.
  4. Bring business process and business rules from the portal to the back-end, and make available to the portals and other apps.

"Portals should be built as Dynamic Business Apps, built with technologies like OutSystems - which can enable rapid change."

Pedro and the Keep it Simple team recommend that their customers and (probably applicable other industries)

  • Improve your organization's time to market
  • Use Agile methods get closer to end-user and address their needs
  • Identify which components should be embracing change. You don't have to change everything all the time, but some systems need to adapt to change faster than others.
  • Invest to consolidation of  IT IS around Dynamic Businss Applications.
Have you heard of Dynamic Business Apps and Lean & Agile Development - what do you think of it? Will it work for you?

Extending Core Systems in a SOA Environment

By Maysoon A on April 16, 2009 11:42 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks
The "Agile Delivery Experiences" track was kicked off by Rosa Mimoso, Director of Global & Support Systems of Caixa Seguros.  Rosa shared how Caixa Seguros e Saude,Portugal's largest insurance group used Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and OutSystems Agile technologies to address their extremely large and complex business and technology environment (millions of customers & claims, 4 companies, 5 brands and hundreds of legacy apps.)  

caixaseguros.jpgRosa told the audience how they decided to break up their complex environment into 3 layers - Front-end, Services and Core Systems. They used the Agile Platform to enable their channel portals for customers and brokers. This was supported by existing services in the SOA architecture. OutSystems' Agile Platform is also exposing reusable services to other applications in their environment.

Rosa described the benefits that SOA & Agile brought to Caixa Seguros e Saude:
-A single point of access for all solutions
-Formally documented services supported by WSDL
-Real time control: centralized logs & reporting; performance indicators and alerts.
-Simplified management of multi-channel configurations, dynamic content and a common security model
-Faster component upgrade
-Simplified B2B Integration

Rosa wrapped up her presentations with the Caixa Seguros e Saude team's 5 key findings:
 
1.The systems in different layers need to be able to evolve at different speeds.
2.Integration needs to be independent from system evolution
3.New systems need to be introduced smoothly and without disruptions
4.This approach requires a paradigm shift in the core systems classification
5.Technology needs to allow Business and IT to be aligned.

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