Paridhi: What challenges was STG facing when it started its transformation journey?
 
Wayne:  The challenges were not unlike the rest of the industry.  Demands for shorter development cycles, focus on deliver to the customer what matters, and high quality.

Paridhi: Why did STG decide to go agile and how did they do it?

Wayne:  I’ve never been called an agile purist, so while the agile concepts have definitely taken hold and helped STG, we realized it is okay to have a hybrid development process that includes as much agile as possible.  The net is that you really need to take the best practices of agile development and see where they will work in your environment.   

Once STG realized that not everyone could be 100% agile, progress was made in agreeing on agile processes.  Once the principals were agreed upon, a solution was needed to put the best practices into action.  Hands down, IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) was the solution selected.  The high adoption rate reflects RTC’s acceptance to our stakeholders and success in implementing a solution that supports agile practices.

Paridhi: What business benefits did STG see by going agile?

Wayne:  It is difficult stating quantitative measurements, but we have seen obvious improvements in areas of project management.  Some of the improvements can be contributed to agile practices and some to the usage of RTC.  RTC has eliminated a lot of the spreadsheets and chart decks.  Instead we are seeing more RTC base reports and dashboards.
 

 Resources

• Video: Accelerating hardware and software co-development in IBM Systems and Technology Group
• White paper: Accelerating product development through codevelopment of hardware and software
• Soltion Brief: IBM Rational solution for the co-development of software and hardware
• Webcast: Build quality products by leveraging agile development and automated metric reporting
• Rational Electornics & Medical Devices website

Meet the Expert: Wayne Carrigan

Wayne Carrigan is the lead IBM System and Technology Group (STG) Rational Deployment Architect with the responsibility of deploying IBM Rational solutions to +27,000 IBM STG system developers, testers, and project managers. He has spent all 28 years of his IBM career at the IBM site in Rochester, Minnesota. Wayne's system development experience from hardware development to application development has put him in a unique situation of architecting deployment of key IBM Rational technologies in a converged fashion so that all system development disciplines can share necessary artifacts.