Over time we have received a lot of questions around agile, Smart, smart use cases, the Accelerated Delivery Platform. This page gives you an overview of such questions.
Contact
The ADP community core team can be contacted on
adp.nl@capgemini.com
Describe your history with agile methodologies. Demonstrate experience and references in the proposed methodologies along with successes stories¶
Capgemini has developed a software development platform, called the Accelerated Delivery Platform (ADP), which is aimed at delivering high quality software at high speed. This platform holds a large number of project accelerators, including the agile methodology Smart, smart use cases, smart estimation, agile dashboards and burn downs, and even code generators. The ADP is built upon 10 years of experience in agile software development. Members of the ADP Core Team include well known agile evangelists of the first hour. The versions of Smart dates back to 1999, and smart use cases were already added in 2000. The first book on the platform was published with Addison Wesley (in Dutch) in 2003. Currently accelerators from the platform are used in dozen of projects in various countries.
Detail how Smart adheres to industry standards including certification paths?¶
Smart was originally designed as an implementation of the DSDM methodology, combined with project management best practices borrowed from the market standard PRINCE2. Agile requirements, using smart use cases as the primary unit of work were added in 2000. Smart combines a vast amount of real life project experience with well known market agile best practices, including pair programming, continuous integration, stand up meetings, retrospectives. Smart shares a large number of these best practices with other methodologies such as XP, Scrum, RUP and DSDM. Unique to Smart is that it combines agile requirements (in smart use cases) with a easy to learn process, and additional tooling such as estimation techniques, dashboards, burn downs and even code generation (based on smart use cases as well).
Please provide the number of consultants that you have working in project development in agile / Smart / Scrum
The ADP community is centered by the ADP Core Team, which consists of around 20 very experienced agile coaches and consultants. Moreover, Capgemini currently employs over 100 agile consultants, developers and testers, who have all been trained in ADP accelerators, who coach organizations, projects and who participate in projects. Furthermore, a large number of organization apply accelerators from the ADP for their software development. Approximately 1.000 people work in ADP / Smart projects.
How does Smart handle COTS projects including integration and customization of the COTS tools?¶
Smart use cases are a equally granular, standardized approach to modeling agile requirements. Smart use cases have proven to be extremely successful in several types of projects, including web application development, portals, Windows, SOA projects, but also in BI / data warehousing an package implementations. In the latter case, the requirements in COTS integration and implementation projects are modeled out in smart use cases, that are later categorized into smart use cases that are delivered by the COTS / packaged solutions, smart use cases that need to be customized, and smart use cases that still need to be developed. This categorization helps set up accurate planning and estimation in agile COTS implementation projects to a large extend.
How does Smart / agile scale? What are the differences between large and small projects?¶
As other agile methodologies, such as Scrum and XP, Smart scales from small projects (4 – 8 people, in a few months) to large projects (over 60 people, several years). The idea is to create as little overhead in large projects as possible, e.g. by organizing team lead stand up meetings, consistent process improvement, training on the job and providing pragmatic project progress dashboards. Moreover, the highly standardized smart use cases are a great unit of work especially in distributed, outsourced projects, as they are easily interpreted and developed. We also apply our Accelerated Dashboard to such projects. This is an online agile dashboard that efficiently tracks project progress (e.g. applying burn downs).
Detail what tools are required / recommended to enable benefits from the Accelerated Delivery Platform (think of Rational/QC/Clarity/Slim/Smart estimation etc.)?
Agile projects travel light. In most ADP projects we apply:
- the UML tool Enterprise Architect (EA, low prices, high on features) for requirements (smart use cases) and structural modeling (domain models).
- for estimation we use the exported models from EA and smart estimation poker set (sets of cards).
- for tracking project progress we apply our Accelerated Dashboard, for free.
- additionally if code generation comes into play – to create even higher productivity, the tool of choice in ADP projects is Tobago MDA, which can be use free of license, as it is developed by the ADP Core Team.
- templates for code generation are available for a large number of deliverables. Most of the templates have been developed on the job during projects, and even from the Arnhem Nijmegen University.
- for .Net software development we apply our ADF Framework, again free of costs.
- development tool of choice – e.g. for Microsoft project this is Visual Studio, including refactoring tool ReSharper.
How does Smart / agile plan for and transition to Maintenance & Operations?¶
Maintenance is an implicit and important stage in the lifecycle of any software product. Therefore Smart captures this stage as the last (and again iterative) stage in its process, applying the same agile best practices as during the project in which the software was delivered. Normally the iteration are longer (about 8 to 12 weeks depending on release calendars) and the work items smaller. However, as the smart use cases models (and domain models) serve as project documentation and reference, and ADP project built on a standardized software architecture, there is an extremely high traceability in ADP software. Thus ADP products are easy to maintain.
Describe levels of improvement or business outcomes that can be expected from Smart / agile, for instance defect reduction, cost savings, cycle time?
In general, there are a number of benefits from applying accelerators of the ADP to software development projects. These include:
- Higher customer acceptance of delivered software. Recently a first ADP project at large financial institution was set in production the last day of the last Finalize iteration, with full customer satisfaction.
- Increased productivity. In September a first ADP pilot for a Dutch government agency resulted in a productivity of less than 2 hours per function point! This was about 6 times faster than the customer expected. We scored for setting up an agile .Net software factory for roughly 2M Euro.
- Increased quality. Due to the high integration of different project disciplines and high traceability from requirements to code (and even tests).
- High flexibility. A nice quote from the Belgian Post “We did not get exactly what we ordered, but we did get what we needed.” Smart projects are set to deal flexible with changing and new requirements. This is done by delivering in short iterations, and prioritizing the deliverables (based on smart use cases) each iteration.
Provide a plan for measuring the success of a project that utilizes Smart / agile
In general ADP projects are set to fixed date, fixed budget (but not fixed scope). Projects velocity and thus project success is often expressed in:
- Hours per smart use case point.
- Euros per smart use cases point.
- Number of realized smart use points per iteration (highly important to measure project velocities).
- During projects progress is continuously measured, even real-time using ours Accelerated Dashboard. This allows us to steer and optimize the project fast and continuously.
Provide a plan for measuring success of the methodology (long term success at company or division level).
Long term acceptance can be measured using:
- Customer satisfaction
- Low total cost of ownership on delivered software
- Level of changes in delivered software.
- Business acceptance of agile / Smart software development (as business plays an important role in agile / Smart projects).
What are your experiences on applying TMap in agile projects?
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We sure have experience in applying test techniques in agile projects. We have developed an agile software development platform (called ADP) that supplies such techniques (like the TMap process cycle test). We apply smart use cases as our main unit of work, estimation and testing. This technique works fine in many of our agile projects. Our platform holds an agile methodology called Smart (hence smart use cases) that includes these techniques in our daily use case cycle. I’ll leave you for now with a quick overview of the platform.
The Accelerated Delivery Platform (ADP) is an agile software development platform targeted at creating high productivity and quality in software development at Capgemini and its customers. ADP integrates a set of proven accelerators for software development projects of any kind, including smart use cases, smart estimation and model driven development. The platform is open source and open knowledge, and is supported by a growing community.
Current coverage of Accelerator (Geographical coverage / Domain Coverage / SBU Coverage)¶
Netherlands, Belgium use the platform. Many customers (and even competitors) in the Netherlands and Belgium use accelerators from the platform. However, we have trained two teams in India as well, and material from the ADP has been used in customer proposals around the world (including US, UK, Australia, Germany, India).
Number of projects or engagements where the accelerator has been used and how has it benefitted (or impacted) the engagement?¶
Most of the accelerators in the platform have been used in a large number of projects – as they have been there for a number of years. E.g. our agile methodology Smart dates back to 1999, and has been used in over 50 project (at least, as far as I can count). Smart use cases have a high adoption grade in the market.
Which client-project stages the accelerator is best suited for going from ‘Inspire (pre-sales) > Plan > Design > Build > Maintain]? And why?¶
All stages. The methodology we apply, called Smart ranges through each of these stages. Moreover, there’s reliable and pragmatic estimation techniques in the platform e.g. to help create better proposals.
Success / Failure stores of accelerator usage (and key learnings / Critical Success Factors coming from those)¶
A lot, mostly successes. Difficult to state key learnings / CSF’s in a few sentences.
SWOT Overview of the accelerator
Best explained verbally.
Any constraints with the accelerator (IT / People)
Best explained verbally. Capgemini is standardized on using RUP and there are people that are reluctant to move to agile software development. Capgemini should get into agile real fast, or risks lagging behind. Most customer organization will be going agile in the next 3-5 years.
Any recommendations on Change Management (to ensure that its usage increases)
Best explained verbally. Agile is best understood when implemented and used.