Continuous Improvementis IN!
Getting CI right is about capturing and realizing what provides additional value to the customer. In almost real-time. You must be agile and proactive to be always improving your applications. This is about culture, methodology, and product architecture. Just a few years back, this but be difficult to realize - now, the pieces are coming together.
Key elements from Toyota/Kaizen/TQM spring to mind: customer satisfaction drives our business – every day, every employee can and should make suggestions for improvements, change is on-going and incremental. Continuous improvement of the customer experience and value.
SCRUM is one of the Agile development methodologies that allows for fast adaption to changing objectives. With short development cycles of a few weeks, new functionality and bug fixes can be introduced to the market in a steady manner. Automated testing of the entire application can be employed to secure that changes to code have not had negative effects elsewhere.
The architecture for CI needs to be well-defined and modular to allow for functionality to be implemented without having to tinker with large parts of the existing application. Resources spend on architecture are well-spend.
Cloud Computing and the availability of Virtual Servers from hosting providers has greatly improved the operational flexibility as capacity can be deployed and removed on the fly - if is has been thought into the architecture.
Most functionality is left unchanged between each increamental improvement and automated testing is ideal to ensure that is really the case.
According to the people who put their money where their beliefs are, the future of software is about delivering services in easy to understand, recurring business models - SaaS. Continuous Improvement is the natural extension of SaaS. CI is what makes ISVs stay close to their clients and their needs. And differentiates the service companies from the product ones.
Give us a call, if you want to discuss how to CI-enable your company.
Jesper Lindholt