From the Sage MAS Team

[#1]

Over the last year or so within our Product Organization we have increased our transparency into how we do product development. Much of the genesis is around how we continue to foster and strengthen our vibrant ecosystem. We want to ensure our development partners within the ecosystem are walking along bringing their respective solution offerings with MAS products as we evolve our releases. Hopefully, this early visibility helps align your product development plans tighter to the appropriate MAS product release cycle.

Essentially, we have taken our Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) and extended it to include our ecosystem. We appropriately call it XPDLC (Extended Product Development Life Cycle).

XPDLC is well supported by the way we do product development internally. We leverage industry leading agile development methodology – namely Scrum methodology during our product development. Every function within our product development organization (Product Manager, Designer, Developer, QA, Usability Analyst, Documentation) participate in a scrum team; having sprints of 3 weeks duration. At the end of every 3 weeks – respective MAS product organization comes together to do “show and tell” of what got developed/tested over the last 3 weeks. We call these “Sprint Review” sessions. In some regard – every 3 week we pull the functionally tested product together and demo the latest and greatest.

Every team within the organization is synchronized to the same 3 week sprint schedule. It promotes working software that is tested and ready with the incremental net new functionality every 3 weeks. Once we reach these milestones and at regular check point intervals we can now make various aspects of the tested product – source code, design document, etc. available for appropriate external stakeholders to consume.

This model has been helpful thus far. It has allowed everyone to know periodically how everything else is progressing. It has brought down some communication barriers as well as improved project management challenges that existed before. This has provided everyone with a clear line of sight to the end goal on how the entire release is progressing.

This is one of several examples towards our effort to support the ecosystem. I will be curious to know your thoughts and feedback – as we make our journey of opening up our development processes and increasing visibility towards the releases in development.

[#2]

First thank you for shaing this information. I personally appreciate knowing the types of methodologies that others are trying or adopting. I have read and studied the Scrum books as well. This is an interesting method. It takes a lot of Teamwork and discipline.

We have found it to be very useful in new development projects. As Ken Schwaber states in Agile Project Management with Scrum, "the power of time-boxing to instill the the art of the possible and avoid the pursuit of perfection, the practice of incremental delivery to improve engineering practices, and the practice of empowerment and self-organization to foster creativity and worker satisfaction."

This does require full buy in from the Team. While it has it challenges and discipline, it allows everyone to become fully engaged in the projects.