ChannelAdvisor is So Agile
No, we aren’t trying to compete with Nastia Liukin - we just aren’t that flexible. I’m talking about something a lot more exciting than spinning through the air: software development!
After experimenting with it for a good while, last year the product development team here at ChannelAdvisor jumped wholeheartedly into agile software development. Specifically, a flavor of agile called scrum. This is a relatively new way of producing software that has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. It has proven effective for us on a number of fronts:
- Software is Delivered Incrementally
Instead of spending tons of time planning and implementing huge projects, we bite off smaller chunks of functionality and get it in our customers’ hands as soon as we can. We then iterate on what we originally release to add on additional features and functionality. - Software is Delivered More Often
Those of you who have been with us for a while might recall that we used to have releases every 3 – 6 months. These days we release software every 6 or 7 weeks. - The Customer is Directly Involved
By getting smaller pieces of functionality in front of our customers more often, we are able to get valuable feedback as we go. Gone is the risk spending six months developing something only to find out it is not what our clients need or want. - Change is Expected and Embraced
In this fast-moving ecommerce world, priorities can change quickly. Since we aren’t working on big, monolithic projects we are much better able to change direction when we need to (and so be agile!). For instance, we don’t have to completely shelve a major project we are in the middle of just to respond to a new eBay requirement – we can just include it as a new priority in our next iteration of the software.
We believe in agile so strongly that we opened a specialized Agile Development Center at our corporate headquarters here in North Carolina. We have a set of small, focused teams dedicated to delivering real value to our customers, often and with high quality.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll post a few more notes about why and how we do agile development here at ChannelAdvisor. After that, I really need to get out from in front of this computer and start training for the next Summer Olympics - I think Nastia has a bit of a head start on me.