My favorite line from Monday Night Football comes from the days of Don Meredith. He and the other sportscasters were citing all of the adjectives ending in ‘ile’ that applied to football players. Don emphasized the long ‘i’ in ‘ile’ (as in ‘smile’), in his distinctive southern drawl. He started with “Mobile, versatile, agile”, and then, for good measure, threw in “nimbile”.

A few years ago the term ‘agile’ started popping up in conversations I had with developers. At first I thought nothing of it, that it was just a descriptive adjective. After all, who wouldn’t want to be agile? And who would want to be the opposite - inflexible, as slow to change course as a super-tanker? But the term kept popping up, to the point where it started to become annoying. Why all of the emphasis on this one word?

Well, thanks to our development managers, in the past year we have dug deep, found out, and applied what we learned to our development process. We have transformed our approach to developing software and aren’t looking back. It turns out there’s a whole methodology behind this ‘agile’ word, one that applies especially well to developing software for small and medium businesses, as we do.

Unlike enterprise software vendors who target the Fortune 500 (which is perpetually capped at 500 companies), our target customers number in the millions, with needs that are constantly changing. To produce software that sells, we need to be in constant contact with customers, and have a tight feedback loop so that what we learn from the market gets implemented in our software on a timely basis. When we were a small company, that ability to quickly react to what we learned was an important part of our success. As we added more to our software over time, though, the amount of planning, development time and testing increased, and response time worsened. At times, because we were in the middle of a long project, we’d go long stretches before being able to respond to a market need, whether it was fixing a bug or adding an important feature. The more success a product has, the worse this problem can get. Just ask Microsoft about their woes setting a Vista ship date.

‘Agile’ development has allowed us to reverse that trend. It’s making a real difference to us and our customers. If there’s a bug that’s affecting many customers, we target a fix and are able to release it much faster than in our pre-‘agile’ days. Or if we’re hearing the same request from many customers, we’re able to add a feature and quickly release it. I’ll give examples of such cases in subsequent posts.

With ‘agile’, we’ve increased communication with customers, reduced response time, put out more frequent releases, and increased quality. The substantial investment we made in changing our development process is paying off, and will have even more benefit as we go forward.

I just wish they’d called it ‘nimbile’.

Posted by Roger Greene
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