Looking Back: Creating a Software Factory – Part 3
This is the final post in my three part series (see parts one & two ) about creating a software factory. After some research I discovered that the practices I saw in India belonged to a larger group of practices named Agile software development . I wanted to start to using these practices locally with my team. Since I had a running factory, I couldn’t retool in mid cycle. I create a small pilot/swat team to try out the practices and find the best way to incorporate them into the team overall. The pilot team consisted of a designer/business analyst, developer, and a QA tester. After a short ramp up time this team was able to easily do lean design, test first / test driven development (TDD) and collective code ownership. Paired programming and continuous integration were going to be more tricky due to some corporate policies in place. The team was quite fast since the department’s heavy weight process didn’t impede them. Less defects from development meant less time in QA and faste