Johannesburg, 03 Mar 2015
Daniel Gombe, CEO of Johannesburg-based customised technology and business solutions firm, Sochin Technologies, says speed and agility have become the order of the day for every IT department in every enterprise.
"But, upgrades and new application implementations can fail if speed is the only focus area," he says. "Agility best practice methodologies must be applied to ensure that not only are upgrades and new applications rolled out quickly, they are also rolled out effectively," he says.
Raising standards
Gombe says: "Organisations have a hard time getting users to upgrade to the latest version of software if users have learnt by experience that 'upgrading' to a new version generally leads to unexpected problems as bugs are found in the software. When software is released containing defects, customers lose faith in the developer. Not only does the developer suffer reputational damage impacting future revenue, it also faces increased support costs as customers discover problems and need support to resolve them."
Quality issues often arise due to the overly-rushed release of new software, says Gombe. "Detection and prevention of quality dampeners needs to happen early in the software life cycle. Agility best practice dictates that early and frequent delivery of working software on an iterative, incremental basis prevents surprises on quality. A positive consequence of this is early realisation of business value and value creation-based strategic direction to the software being built."
Fast-tracking new feature releases
This iterative, incremental approach also prevents development bottlenecks, which could slow down the release cycle, says Gombe. "In an environment where organisations lose competitive advantage if they fall behind the opposition, the software life cycle for creating, testing and deploying new features to customers has to be fast-tracked. However, in some cases, new features might rely on experts, who become a bottleneck. Another potential hurdle is architecture that is not flexible enough to allow for rapid enhancements and extensions."
To overcome these challenges and speed up the release of new features, organisations should reduce complexity of implementation by means of continuous refactoring, scalable architecture and simple design.
Avoiding software white elephants
It is not unusual to find instances where costly software has failed to prove useful, or is simply not being employed by the end-users, says Gombe. "This is usually the result of customers not knowing or defining what they really needed at the requirement phase, which results in the system being built upon wrong assumptions."
Gombe says in some instances, this might occur when the marketing department is a proxy for customers, and requirements from marketing are just a forecast that is not always on track. "If some features are used much less frequently than anticipated, it may be an indicator that marketing priorities may not be in line with the customers' priorities. Software white elephants might also occur when requirements are signed off and locked down in a vacuum, and too early, and when user experience is ignored. Because change can be costly in terms of the time, money, effort and psychology involved in starting over, the software fails in its purpose."
Gombe says it is important that requirements are determined before confirmation and sign-off. "It is important to involve the real user or a representative reflecting user needs when requirements collaboration is done. During the product increment demo at the end of each iteration, the user must be involved again, to get feedback about the product increment developed," he says.
Best practice balance
Speed and agility are crucial in IT today, says Gombe, but development speed must be balanced with best practice methodologies, to ensure new applications and upgrades are released quickly, and that they also perform effectively, to deliver real business value.
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