PLANZONE feat. AGILE project management

Written by Planzone | Sep 30, 2009 9:30:41 AM

There are no questions that internationalisation and fast-growing social communities (such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo ....) are major trends in today’s technology market.

To compete effectively in this environment and provide value to global customers, it requires a continuous development of new technologies at a whirlwind pace. As a result, Product Life Cycle shortens and software companies are facing an increased pressure to deliver new results fast.

Time are gone when you could afford to release a new software version every 12 or 18 months and ask your customers to wait that long to incorporate their feedback into this new release. Today, you almost have to show tangible results and product improvements every month or so...

These trends have led to an increased interest in AGILE software development methodologies. This way of working not only guarantees a fast qualitative and flexible software delivery it also ensures that you can incorporate customer needs and feedback in your roadmap on a permanent basis.
This is the philosophy we follow at Planzone.

We abide to the following principles of AGILE project management:

· We break down big ideas into simple detailed user stories that we can plan and develop for a given SPRINT
(at Planzone, a SPRINT cycle is a period of 15 days where we select which work will be done)
· We start development, only when the details have been discussed and agreed upon...

· We continue discussing these during development

· We run automated tests every day, so that we can detect regressions

· We always finish what we start in a SPRINT

· We are reactive to new ideas... but discuss them only for the next SPRINT (we do not disturb the current one)

· If an idea is unclear, we plan a study/prototype before starting implementation in a next SPRINT

· We share our progress every day (status) and in the “SPRINT retrospective” (demo)

· We share the problems and issues we face, every day - so we help each other out.

· We measure the team’s velocity to improve our estimation skills and be more realistic in SPRINT planning

From our latest interview with Jean-Luc Bernette, you know we have been using the AGILE SCRUM process model for Planzone from the start. This perfectly fits our product strategy, team structure and underlying philosophy.

For the development of our new Planzone user interface, the team made a thorough research into the latest web 2.0 user interaction trends. We then applied our AGILE SCRUM process to design a brand new user interface that will show the maximum efficiency gain for our customers.

Last week you could already enjoy a preview of our future user interface of Planzone. Needless to say we are very excited about it!

Follow our blog posts and stay tuned, as we will release more information in the very near future!!!

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