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Home > Tools > WareAbouts
Switching to new agile development software and processes in the midst of a major release was a gamble for a developer of corporate performance management solutions. But the risk paid off with reductions in testing and packaging time as well as a nearly 30 percent increase in developer capacity.
Emma Browning sums up her company's problem succinctly: "We were never sure how much 'done' we were at any given time." Browning, director of product development at Acorn Systems' Houston office, recalls the frustrations of having her developers finish a feature for its corporate performance management software, send it into testing, and then have bugs show up that needed fixing only after her developers were already embroiled in designing the next feature.
"It wouldn't be obvious that we weren't done with something, because the bugs would sometimes take a lot longer to fix than we anticipated," she says.
Complicating matters, the privately held firm, with employees spread across the United States and the Ukraine, was using more than half a dozen disparate tools for requirements testing, defect tracking and program management. Along with constantly scrambling to keep information in sync, the company also had to be nimble enough to adapt to the rapidly emerging business intelligence market.
"We have to make decisions and adjustments as the business climate changes,” says Torsten Weirich, Acorn's executive vice president of product development.
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