Category: Development

“Agile development practices have steadily risen to become trusted and preferred methods of development… using agile, organizations can respond to market changes faster, deliver higher-quality software, and gain a significant competitive edge.”  – Harvard Business Review

Considering these benefits, it’s no surprise that Agile development has become immensely popular among technology companies. More than a fixed methodology, Agile development is a mindset that embraces flexibility as its key characteristic: “…evolving our practices to suit the challenges at hand,” according to Andy Hunt, one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto.  

At Atlantic BT, we put these ideas into practice with a hybrid approach incorporating many aspects of Agile development into each project. One thing that sets Atlantic BT apart is we apply this mindset during the discovery phase of the project when we are working with the client to define product requirements.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers: “One of the key differentiators for the Agile methodology is the requirements-gathering process and the iterative approach that fosters alignment through increased communication… Agile provides a high level requirements process to define what the system should provide, not how the system should work…”

This quote sums up Atlantic BT’s approach: you start at the very highest level of requirements for your business and your customers, what they need to achieve, and don’t discuss how that will be done until later. The details of how you achieve those objectives come in the second critical part of the quote, during the iterative process of increasingly refining your focus to more granular aspects of the requirements and solution.

Our solutions team has a toolbox of discovery techniques to observe, investigate, research, and experiment. These techniques allow us to ask and answer specific questions about needs and potential solutions. The specific forms of discovery include interviews, workshops for brainstorming and collaboration, surveys, reviews, and focus groups, among others.

We identify requirements in a hierarchical, iterative approach so each step informs and determines the next. For example, in the very beginning we use stakeholder interviews and sometimes business model and/or value proposition workshops to identify key aspects of the business and the project. These aspects include a first pass definition of the market and which customer segments the solution should address.

Let’s take User Research as an example; we need to define many characteristics of the people who will use the solution, such as their demographics, wants, needs, and behavior patterns. Depending on the nature of the website or application being developed, we may need to go into more detail regarding specific tasks and workflow, as well as roles and permissions.

In order to discover those details about the user base, we employ one or more of the following techniques:

• Persona Workshops
• Contextual Inquiries
• Affinity Map
• User Alignment
• Focus Groups
• Surveys

Each technique answers specific types of questions and provides certain types of information. However, we won’t know which of these techniques to use until we have performed the first-pass definition of business requirements. For example, a business that needs to deepen engagement of existing users might survey those users to learn more about what they wanted; a business that needs to reach new audiences might use persona workshops to discover who these new users are.

Another possibility is that something we find in discovery may send us down a completely unexpected path. For example, we recently had a client engage us for a redesign of their static marketing website. Their current site contained hundreds of pages of content, so we took the usual step of performing a content inventory. This technique is helpful in determining information architecture, content update needs, finding forms and data feeds, etc.

Our content inventory also led to an important discovery—the website contained functionality for posting open positions and accepting applications for those positions. The initial client brief had not mentioned this critical capability.

As a result, we added a step in discovery to perform a process analysis and map out their entire process for posting and filling new positions. This would identify exactly which steps would need to be replaced in the new website. Had we not done this, when the old website was turned off, they would have suffered a severe disruption to their hiring process. As an added benefit, this analysis identified multiple process improvement opportunities which were incorporated into the requirements discussion for the next phase of their project.

These two examples show how applying the agile principles of flexibility and feedback from the very start of a project provide several benefits throughout the project:

• Optimize resource use by applying only the techniques needed.
• Identify risks as early as possible in a project.
• Identify opportunities for continuous process improvement.
• Allow for prioritization of tasks.
• Increase precision of estimate of effort.

To recap, we find it is not efficient to try to state categorically exactly what the appropriate discovery for a given project will look like in advance. This one-size-fits-all approach either includes too much (and is thus expensive), or misses crucial information (thus incurring high project risk). Instead, we find it much more effective to “adapt our practices to suit the challenges at hand” (to paraphrase Andy Hunt). This optimizes resource use, minimizes risk, and maximizes quality for us and for our clients: a win-win application of Agile development.

Ever worked on a project that had no written requirements? How about one that had a one- paragraph specification for a major feature?

Ever had to skip steps in the process and ‘throw something over the wall’ to Quality Assurance (QA) to meet your deadline? It’s their job to find all of the bugs, right? If you’re feeling really confident, maybe you could just skip QA altogether and push it live?

Unfortunately, I can say yes to all of these questions. In my past, I have worked from one-line requirements and sometimes even a post-it note from a client. I must admit I have seen my share of work that was not unit tested, but was simply handed over to QA. Predictably, it failed the very first test. I confess I also witnessed the shortening of a QA cycle for the sake of meeting a project deadline.

But that is in my past.

How We Ensure Quality at Atlantic BT

I’ve found a better way, one I’ve learned from working with a team dedicated to providing the BEST digital solutions for our clients. To achieve this, we established several roles and processes to ensure quality doesn’t start with the QA team.

Project Management

If you select the wrong resources for the project, your project timeline and the quality of the work will suffer. The Project Manager lays out the project plan and evaluates the project needs to determine the right people for the job. They monitor the timeline, watch the budget, and regularly update the client on the project progress. All this comes together to raise the quality of service we provide to clients.

User Experience (UX) & Design

It’s crucial that the project design aligns with the client vision in a way that meets the business needs and provides the best possible user experience. The User Experience and Design team fills this need, capturing the client vision in a way that no one else can. They use persona workshops and stakeholder interviews to examine the needs and preferences of the end users. Then, this team generates concept boards to provide a sense of the design direction, a site outline to visually display the organization of project pages, and wireframes to show how users will navigate the system or site. Bringing this client vision to life is how the UX and Design team contribute to the quality of the project.

Architecture

Behind the project’s design are a host of technical details to ensure quality. That’s where our Architecture team excels. They are focused on gathering and documenting requirements that describe the project’s functionality based on client goals. This team collaborates with the client to understand business rules and expands user stories to provide an accurate functional specification document. This document is the basis of what we build. The Architecture team also answers technical questions during the development and QA phases of the project. By creating a strong architecture and specification document, the Architecture team lays the foundation for building a strong, quality product.

Information Technology (IT)

During the project, it’s vital that everyone on the team can work on a development server configured the same way as the final production server will be. Our IT team makes this possible by setting up the database servers, CMS, S3 buckets, and other tools to establish stable environments for development and QA testing. This allows us to identify issues with configuration and system resources prior to going live. It also lends to a smoother transition when launching the project, which is essential to guaranteeing quality.

Development

Finally, it’s important to create a system that meets client specifications in a way that is efficient and user-friendly. The Development team makes this happen by taking outputs from Architecture, UX, and Design to build the project and ensure the requirements are met. This team also holds code reviews and runs unit tests to check the quality of the code before handing over features to the QA team.

As you can see, quality is a team effort that begins long before the QA team gets involved. Once my QA team receives the outputs from each of them, we can create and execute test plans that consider the business rules, general requirements, user experience, browser compatibility, and much more.

I’m grateful to be part of a company that knows quality does not start with the QA team.  At Atlantic BT, quality begins with understanding our clients’ vision and what’s best for their business. It is something we think about in each phase of the project so that our final delivery is something we are proud to put our name on.