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Agile Development Conference (ADC '03)
"Ready-to-Roll" Boxcar Development - a Flexible, Quality-Weighted Process
Salt Lake City, Utah
June 25-June 28
ISBN: 0-7695-2013-8
Russell R. Hill, WarpTime
In January of 1996, Intuit?s QuickBooks team was faced with an aging code-base using a custom Mac/Win GUI toolkit, a large and rapidly growing customer base, and a rapidly growing and product-inexperienced engineering team. To increase the product?s quality and feature predictability while retaining its ship date rigidity, we created "Ready-to-Roll" Boxcar Development.
The process enabled the defining of each new feature, enhancement, or engineering re-architecture as a set of boxcars on the product train. A "coupled" boxcar was rapidly brought to a supportable level of quality, or "decoupled" for re-evaluation and re-engineering. Frontloading the highest priority boxcars increased predictability of the product train's contents, while the process allowed for greater flexibility with respect to overall content.
"Ready-to-Roll" Boxcar Development kept the product within 2-3 weeks of being supportable and shippable. The process focused on individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change. Better yet, it worked!
Citation:
Russell R. Hill, ""Ready-to-Roll" Boxcar Development - a Flexible, Quality-Weighted Process," adc, pp.99, Agile Development Conference (ADC '03), 2003
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