As businesses evolve and become more mature, so do their needs for more complex yet flexible software solutions. This is actually the reason why software development companies are striving to find ways of improving their SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) and accelerating TTM (Time to Market). To succeed with this goal, software service providers should keep current with today’s technology trends and innovations.
Agile and Lean: Tapping into rewarding practices
Sooner or later, most forward-thinking software companies start reshaping their product developmenand deployment processes to stay competitive and deliver better services to their clients. In most cases, you of course don’t need to restaff your seasoned development team or make them switch from one programming language to another. Reskilling and upskilling your in-house employees via extensive training programs and courses would be a much better idea.
To gain a competitive edge, software companies can enhance their software development and project management workflows by embracing innovative approaches and methodologies widely adopted in IT. In this vein, the most valuable practices and principles are Lean and Agile. Quite different in some aspects, these two approaches have much in common when it comes to delivering better software products to clients in faster times.
What is Lean methodology?
The idea behind the Lean methodology lies in the provision of customer-oriented services, fully tailored to their individual business needs and expectations. Leveraging the Lean practices helps development teams define what exact value they should deliver to assist their clients in solving business-specific problems. What’s more, Lean is about the responsibility of using various resources with care.
As a result, applying the Lean thinking techniques throughout everyday work processes enables software companies to provide better quality and low cost to their clients. The conception of being the Lean enterprise underlies the way of how a today’s software development process should be like. In a nutshell, there are five key Lean enterprise principles:
- Value: Global revenue rates of the Logistics software industry exceed the threshold of US$17 billion in 2021.
- Value Stream: Ensure the right all-out product development life cycle.
- Flow: Maintain workflows with minimal resource waste and maximal value for clients.
- Pull: Provide only the necessary functionality demanded by clients.
- Perfection: Continuously enhance the level of software product quality.
What is Agile?
At its core, Agile practices are aimed at improving software product flexibility and resilience across all the stages of software development life cycle, like user research, product planning, development, testing, deployment, and delivery. Agile is about the capability of a software development company to timely and iteratively respond and adapt to every change that may occur during the process of software creation. For a company, being Agile is more than just following certain frameworks like Scrum. It is more of an entire mindset that drives towards perfection and acceleration of product development workflows and deliverables.
Getting Agile: HebronSoft learns from world’s top business visionaries
To speed up the time-to-market rates of its software products and streamline the overall development process, HebronSoft has long been utilizing Agile principles across its product development flows. Up until recently, when the whole team decided to take a more systematic, coherent approach.
Seeking professional expertise and assistance in providing Agile-backed services, HebronSoft was lucky to meet Scaled Agile, IncThrough its community platform, the company enables both individuals and organizations to achieve and sustain business agility. With the cutting-edge Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), businesses undergo comprehensive training programs and certification courses while learning how to continually deliver innovative software products to their clients. So, HebronSoft was no exception reaching out to the famous Agile gurus for an extensive course for its team members.
HebronSoft and Scaled Agile: Feedback and insights from the course passed
It seemed the HebronSoft team caught an incredibly lucky break when it met Justin Barker, a seasoned Agile methodologist, licensed SAFe trainer, and Certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC). Justin made it possible to provide an exhaustive SAFe® 5 course for the whole team of seven company’s employees. Deeply moved by our mission-driven support of the Hebron IT Academy, Justin Barker decided to upskill our team members as a goodwill gesture without requiring fees of any kind for his coaching services.
Before successfully passing tough course exams and getting certified, our aspiring agilists went through the complex multilevel training program to eventually master the Lean-Agile principles. For your convenience, we’ve collected first-hand insights and feedback from all the stakeholders by asking them to elaborate on the matter.
Apart from your coaching routine, what other activities are you into?
1 Justin Barker, Certified SAFe® Remote Trainer and Certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC)
My company, Minifly Solutions, was founded to provide two services. First, it provides Software Development Leadership and Lean-Agile/SAFe Transformation consulting for small to medium sized organizations. Second, it is the company under which I’m just Justin Barker Photography, a professional family photography company.
What was it like working with the HebronSoft team?
I found the people at HebronSoft to be smart, driven, competent, and very eager to learn about Lean-Agile principles and the Scaled Agile Framework. As young professionals, they seemed very eager to provide value to HebronSoft’s clients and support HebronSoft’s charitable mission.
What stands behind the decision to upskill your employees via the Lean-Agile practices?
Kostiantyn Polosukhin, CEO at HebronSoft
We relentlessly continue to invest in people and their skills, boosting the level of services our company provides to our clients. SAFe and Lean practices combined is a consolidated system of practices, tools and methodologies to drive digital transformation programs at scale.
Why do you believe Agile is the right approach for software development?
Taras Orevchuk, CIO at HebronSoft
This is truly so. The given course has proved that Agile is a powerful tool for us as developers. It helps focus on the value-adding tasks that benefit both businesses and development teams. We got to know what types of roles and responsibilities SAFe is able to provide. I personally liked the workshops where we worked out various task prioritization and estimation techniques along with ways of their delivery.
What is the practical use of the Agile course you’ve just completed?
Bohdan Bilas, CTO at HebronSoft
The course we have recently passed through is truly rewarding in terms of its practical value for our team. Thanks to Scaled Agile Inc. and Justin Barker, we gained an in-depth knowledge of the Lean-Agile methodology, namely the Scaled Agile Framework® functionality. Also, we had a chance to test our newly acquired skills during instructor-led workshops. The course is really helpful, and we are already applying some of its takeaways on our projects.
What’s your take on the SAFe course you’ve just passed?
Natali Nazarko, Design Lead at HebronSoft
I’m a true Agile practitioner, but it is fairly easy to adopt Agile in small organizations with one or two teams. The problem arises when you try to replicate the same success at the enterprise level. It is because Agile practices and processes being used in small teams are not best suited to scale at the enterprise level. Leading SAFe training equips me with the required skills and tools to scale Agile across the enterprise without fail. The course combines both theoretical and practical approaches which is extremely valuable and efficient. Besides, you are always guided by a really professional coach. Justin Barker—our tutor, was very helpful. He has a huge expertise and practical experience, but what is the most important thing—good communicative, teaching and coaching skills. I appreciate a lot the knowledge and skills he helped us obtain. Our company grows so fast and these skills are just in time.
How would you rate the effectiveness of the SAFe course?
Olha Davydovych, Project Manager at HebronSoft
Big time thanks to Justin for very valuable training. I really enjoyed it, and am happy that he made it fun! And also I truly appreciate Justin’s time he spent teaching us the SAFe techniques. We learned a lot about how to apply Agile at scale, how to have a Lean-Agile mindset, and how to implement SAFe core values. We uncovered what The Agile Manifesto principles are and learned how to use the Agile principles at scale. One of the best lessons was to find out how to optimize the full Value Stream while focusing on delays, visualization and WIP limits, reducing batch sizes, and managing queue lengths. We also studied the Agile Release Train (ART), the key coordination roles for an agile release train, how to launch the ART and gain alignment during the PI planning and Enable end-to-end value delivery. We were simulating the PI planning in the form of a game which was really funny. I really appreciate having the opportunity to learn from Justin all about SAFe.
What is your impression on the Leading SAFe® 5 course?
Kristina Rozhniatovska, Project Manager at HebronSoft
It was a great pleasure to get acquainted with the benefits of SAFe, especially while dealing with practical assignments. The course has brought different lenses to my understanding of development processes and workflows in general. I’ve started implementing the insights gained across my daily tasks and got initial positive results already! I’d like to express my deep gratitude to HebronSoft for such a great opportunity for self-development.