erick.kobres@ncr.com
I am the VP of Development of Compris Technologies - a restaurant software company and wholly owned subsidiary of NCR Corporation.
We have recently started working with a combination of Scrum practices and MSF agile tools on some of our development teams. We are still in the early phases of Agile adoption and the associated pain points. In general, the process feels right - but we have some domain-specific challenges to overcome:
- We have Legacy code that was not developed under a TDD methodology.
- Our software is generally deployed in a solution-engagement model in which each installation is highly integrated with the customer's environemnt.
- Deployment of our software is expensive for our customers due to the necessary change control of deploying a production mission-critical system, so most customers don't want software more than 1 time per year.
- We do a large number of small professional-services enhancements to our product that take less time than would benefit from a progression of sprints.
- We have a large number of variants of our solution that we maintain for customers who need patches and service packs, but cannot deploy our latest solution.
