Lessons from Agility meets an eCommerce SaaS Product
ChannelAdvisor is an eCommerce SaaS provider in the online sales arena. In 2007 we decided to take on Scrum / XP as our Agile methodology in developing our products. Our overall adoption has been successful and we are driving further into Agility in 2008. However, some important lessons surfaced from our implementation.
This session focuses on lessons learned in adopting agility including—the importance of effectively training the entire organization, assuring deep stakeholder understanding; the need for experienced coaches; how to deal with lingering waterfall thinking; and the dynamics of organizational (not just technical team) agile adoption.
While your mileage may vary, we believe we faced common challenges and hope our war stories will help your adoption.
Learning Points:
1) We underestimated the need for a more organization-wide adoption focus. We’ll explore aspects of that.
2) How to overcome SaaS driven challenges: quality demands, multi-tasking; the interplay with closely-coupled real customer input; start-up organizational dynamics; and responsiveness.
3) How we’ve approached specific challenges—adoption of agile tools, buffering from excessive multi-tasking, CI implementation challenges, avoiding Waterfall-thinking in our team design efforts.
It is a lesson learned - so a little time will be spent on our context. SaaS really comes into play for us from a speed and quality perspective. We’re finding out more and more why it’s critical to test continuously and well. However, we do have a legacy codebase, so that challenge is ongoing for us.
The overall format will be story-like; providing a time-line of challenges and the incremental adjustments we’ve made to face them and improve.