Software Provider Uses Agile Tools for ALM; Developer Productivity Climbs 50 Percent

OverviewCountry or Region: CanadaIndustry: Education

Customer ProfileSociété GRICS, based in Quebec, Canada, provides technology products, solutions, and services to school districts and other public sector customers.

Business SituationSociété GRICS wanted to transform a “waterfall” software development methodology that did not deliver the developer productivity, product quality, or cost-effectiveness that it sought.

SolutionThe organization adopted an application lifecycle management strategy based on agile tools from InCycle Software, Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, and scrum methodology.

Benefits Increases productivity by 50 percent Reduces time to create working

software by at least 75 percent Boosts product quality

“We’re increasing our work on new initiatives by 50 percent, continuing our work on current initiatives—and doing it with 10 percent fewer developers.”

Denis Bessette, Vice President, Development, Société GRICS

School districts in Canada’s Quebec province depend on Société GRICS for administrative software. Société GRICS depends on its 140 developers to produce and update that software. When customers’ increasing needs and decreasing budgets required a boost in developer productivity, GRICS responded by adopting an application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy. To do so, it used agile tools including InCycle BluePrint, which extends Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 with a turnkey template and ready-to-use initiatives to accelerate and help ensure the success of the transformation to ALM. Having just completed 90 percent of that transformation, Société GRICS has already increased developer productivity by 50 percent on new initiatives, boosted product quality, and gained the agility to make better and faster project assignments in response to business needs.

SituationWhen many people think of a waterfall, the thought is both awesome and delightful, the remembered roar an echo of a world still untamed, the remembered sight a jumble of light, mist, and color that artists can approximate, but not equal.

Denis Bessette, however, was not one of these people.

To be fair, Bessette—Vice President of Development at Société GRICS—would have had a very different waterfall in mind. Bessette’s “waterfall” was a traditional approach to creating software that had outlived its usefulness at the 27-year-old, Quebec, Canada-based organization, and, by 2009, was creating challenges instead. Société GRICS had grown to become one of the most important software providers in Quebec province, delivering about 70 management solutions to regional school districts and municipalities. But the “waterfall” development approach that had once helped it to achieve that position had become an obstacle to the organization’s ability to offer new solutions based on new technologies.

The “waterfall” development approach is linear and flows in one direction—like the cascading water that gives it its name. Highly compartmentalized teams, working with little or no interaction, pass completed software components to each other as a software project moves steadily downstream from concept to design to development to production.

“The waterfall model wasn’t optimized for quality, and software quality became increasingly important to our customers

and to us,” says Bessette. He also points to the specialization of skills that the traditional development approach encouraged. “If we had 10 people on a development team, perhaps one or two would know a given language or other technology with which the team was working,” he says. “If those people left the team, it was difficult to keep development moving forward without a loss of momentum.”

The use of a traditional development approach, combined with equally traditional development tools and technologies, led Société GRICS to spend more of its time maintaining existing products and less time on developing new ones—the opposite of what Bessette and his colleagues knew they needed to do to meet customer needs and maintain, if not increase, their market position.

While the organization’s public sector customers needed up-to-date software from Société GRICS, they didn’t want to pay updated prices for it. In many cases, they couldn’t. Quebec school districts, like school districts in the United States and elsewhere, faced ever-tightening budgets. “The only way to meet the needs of our customers was for our developers to become significantly more productive,” says Bessette.

The organization acknowledged this formally in a five-year strategic plan that called for Société GRICS to adopt best practices for software development—easy to say, tough to do. Development practices at the organization were sometimes as deeply embedded in its corporate culture as were the millions of lines of code in its

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“The waterfall model wasn’t optimized for quality, and software quality became increasingly important to our customers and to us.”

Denis Bessette, Vice President, Development, Société GRICS

20-year-old products. Société GRICS needed more than a dramatically different and more productive way to produce software. It needed a proven way to introduce that new methodology to its developers, a way that would ensure consistent and maximum adoption, and optimal results.

Bessette and Société GRICS wanted to implement a new process for development and leave the waterfall process behind them as quickly as possible.

SolutionSociété GRICS realized it needed a new way to manage not just software development, but the entire lifecycle of an application, including testing, release, and updates. Because the organization made significant use of Microsoft technologies, albeit often previous-generation technologies, it turned to its technology vendor for help.

Microsoft introduced Société GRICS to InCycle Software, a Microsoft Partner Network member with multiple Gold competencies and a focus on providing comprehensive tools, training, and processes for the adoption of application lifecycle management (ALM) strategies by Microsoft .NET–based development teams. Central to InCycle Software’s philosophy is the idea that how an organization adopts a new ALM strategy is as much a determinant of success as the strategy that it chooses to adopt.

ALM and the Tools to Adopt ItInCycle Software helped Société GRICS to explore the idea of managing its enterprisewide development process according to the principles of agile

development, which uses repeated, small projects by flexible teams to create high-quality software at low cost.

“We chose to adopt the most popular implementation of agile development, the scrum framework, which contains specific processes for prioritizing, planning, producing, and appraising projects,” says Michel Biron, Director, Development Support at Société GRICS. “Next, we needed to decide on a change management system to guide our adoption of scrum.”

The organization met that need with InCycle Software’s Agile Improvement Framework, a change management system for ALM adoption that is itself built on many of the elements of scrum, including: Process owners who prioritize the

adoption of ALM elements from a process backlog.

Teams that use sprint (short bursts) planning to identify how they’ll implement a given element of ALM, adopt the ALM element during a short sprint, and assess their progress daily.

Tools are a key element of the Agile Improvement Framework. Chief among those tools is InCycle Blueprint, which consists of a turnkey template and ready-to-use initiatives that are designed to accelerate the transformation to an agile ALM strategy and to help ensure the quality and success of that transformation. InCycle BluePrint includes customized lists, reports, and dashboards that sit on top of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.

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“We needed to decide on a change management system to guide our adoption of scrum.”

Michel Biron, Director, Development Support, Société GRICS

Société GRICS used InCycle BluePrint to prioritize improvement initiatives and align them with all levels of the development organization, divide large initiatives into easily implemented components, track and manage tasks, gain visibility into upcoming improvement projects, and ensure that improvements became part of the teams’ daily processes.

“Implementing a transformation to agile methodology can be a highly complex and daunting project,” says Bessette. “InCycle Blueprint was an invaluable tool in taming that complexity, and in keeping us on a straight course toward our goal.”

From Waterfall to Scrum Having identified its objective and the tools to help achieve it, Société GRICS was ready to launch its transformation from waterfall to agile methodology. Using the InCycle Agile Improvement Framework and its InCycle Blueprint, Société GRICS identified its specific priorities for the adoption of ALM. Its 20 development teams were limited to nine developers each—another scrum principle—and all began with instruction on scrum, provided by InCycle Software. Société GRICS worked with InCycle Software to identify a few teams—generally two or three at a time—and the specific aspects of ALM that could most benefit each of them.

For example, one team might focus on unit testing while another might focus on scrum adoption, test management, or automated deployment. Over the course of a two-month sprint, each team transformed from waterfall to agile methodologies on the single initiative on which it was focused. As Société GRICS continued the

transformation process, more teams were drawn into each sprint, and teams already involved were further transformed through additional initiatives. Throughout, Société GRICS used the InCycle Blueprint both to record and measure completed sprints, and to chart the course of new sprints.

Société GRICS began its adoption of ALM in April 2010. Its steady, deliberately paced transformation was 90 percent implemented a year and a half later, in October 2011, with the transformation expected to be completed in the following months—if “completed” is the right word. “Even when all of our teams are using ALM, we won’t be done—we’ll never be done,” says Bessette. “This strategy calls for us to engage in continuous improvement. It’s now part of who we are and how we work.”

BenefitsSociété GRICS uses the InCycle Agile Improvement Framework and its InCycle Blueprint, together with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, to boost developer productivity, product quality, and team agility.

Increases Productivity by 50 PercentIncreased developer productivity was a key goal for Société GRICS when it began its adoption of ALM—productivity that would help it to offer up-to-date software solutions while maintaining competitive prices.

Early indications are that Société GRICS is on track to meet this goal. In 2010, prior to the transformation of its development process to ALM, its development teams included more than 150 developers. Now, the organization has used attrition to

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“On the basis of our experience with InCycle Blueprint and Team Foundation Server, we expect to continue to produce more software, better software, with continuous gains in productivity."

Denis Bessette, Vice President, Development, Société GRICS

reduce that number to 134, a reduction of about 10 percent. And that’s the least of the productivity gain. Bessette estimates that the development workload for new products on new technologies increased by about 50 percent this year, despite the staff reduction.

“We’re increasing our work on new initiatives by 50 percent, continuing our work on current initiatives—and doing it with 10 percent fewer developers,” says Bessette. “On the basis of our experience with InCycle Blueprint and Team Foundation Server, we expect to continue to produce more software, better software, with continuous gains in productivity.”

As an example of accomplishing more with fewer developers, Bessette points to one of the organization’s major projects: implementing updates to the payroll solution that it offers to the human resources departments of school districts and municipalities. That work needs to be done annually, to keep the software current with an array of legal and other changes that occur in the public sector each year.

“We had fewer developers working on our payroll solution this year, despite having big changes to implement,” says Bessette. “It was a larger amount of work; we added a significant number of features; and we completed the work on time and with higher quality. Our product owners acknowledged the greater productivity coming out of our team in just one year. And we’re continuing to deliver business value beyond compliance requirements, to release updates more frequently, and to enhance the system architecture.”

Reduces Time to Create Working Software by at Least 75 PercentUltimately, it is the flexibility that Société GRICS gains from its adoption of agile methodology that fuels the organization’s higher productivity and higher quality, according to Bessette.

The organization’s development teams now work more nimbly. “In three weeks, we have software to demonstrate to customers and others—it used to take us about three months to do that for a small project, a year or two for a major one,” Bessette says. “We are definitely in a position now to release products and updates in line with customer needs and the needs of the organization—development will no longer be the process that holds us back.”

Société GRICS’s greater flexibility manifests itself in other ways, too. For example, the organization quickly redeployed the developers no longer needed on some earlier systems to new product development efforts, helping to expedite the development pace for those. The organization is using this agility to build a new portfolio of administrative solutions, including those for finance, human resources, and payroll.

“It’s not just that we can be more productive with ALM,” says Biron. “We now have more freedom to assign development staff where we want them, not where the technology dictates we must put them.”

Boosts Product Quality When Bessette says that his teams’ adoption of ALM has already led to higher quality, he’s just repeating what he’s been

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“In three weeks, we have software to demonstrate to customers and others—it used to take us about three months to do that for a small project, a year or two for a major one.”

Denis Bessette, Vice President, Development, Société GRICS

told by the internal product owners of the organization’s products.

Bessette traces the higher quality directly to the new processes that Société GRICS has put in place with its adoption of ALM. “Quality assurance used to be something that happened at the end of the software development process,” he says. “Now, everyone involved in the ALM strategy is concerned about quality. Our developers review their code daily to ensure quality. They focus on quality in every sprint that they do. That’s how we’re delivering better software with fewer defects.”

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated development system that helps simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, modeling, and design tools that help you bring your vision to life. Work within a personalized environment that helps accelerate the coding process and supports the use of your existing skills, and target a growing number of platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and cloud services. Also, work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that you can use to find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high-quality solutions.

For more information about Visual Studio 2010, go to:www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about InCycle Software products and services, call (450) 682-4777 ex: 201, or visit the website at: www.incyclesoftware.com

For more information about Société GRICS products and services, call (514) 251-3700 or visit the website at:www.grics.qc.ca

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Software and Services Microsoft Visual Studio− Microsoft Visual Studio Team

Foundation Server 2010

Partner InCycle Software