Kevin Matheny, Senior E-Biz Architect at Best Buy, has an excellent article today on BusinessWeek.com about Best Buy's take on Agile software development and Best Buy's experiences as a client of Pivotal Labs. As he mentions in the article, Pivotal Labs has been helping Best Buy build "Remix", an API for the BestBuy.com product catalog. Kevin describes the agile methods that Pivotal Labs uses and how they've helped with what he calls "Corporate Agility", which he describes as "working components instead of complete solutions, expecting and responding to change instead of trying to eliminate it, and trust rather than control." He also describes how Pivotal Tracker fits into Pivotal's agile process:
For example, I recently added a story to the tracker for Remix that read simply "flag products as new if their start display date is less than 30 days in the past." That's all the up-front documentation needed for Pivotal Labs, a development company that specializes in agile software development, to code that function into Remix. Any additional information can be gathered in the daily 15-minute team meetings or in a longer follow-up if more time is required.
Thanks for the mention, Kevin, and we're very glad that the project is proving to be successful. Pivot Steve Conover is at the helm.
I'm pleased to announce that Pivotal Tracker has been selected as a finalist for the 2008 Jolt Awards. Thanks to everyone on the team for putting so much care into Tracker, and making it what it is today. Winners will be announced March 11, 2009 at SD West in Santa Clara.
Wish us luck!
For the last year or so, we've been inviting speakers to come visit us and talk about interesting things in the Ruby/Rails space, the agile space, and on topics related to software development in general. We see it as a great way to keep our developers on the cutting edge, and a number of speakers have used it as an opportunity to gather early feedback from our team. We've found the talks we've had to be very valuable to us, and are pleased to share them with the larger community.
To that end, we've posted a selection of our talks to our talks page, and also made them available via the Podcast section of the iTunes Store in both audio and video format.
We've also had a number of panel discussions in our Project Startup and are posting those talks as well.
We'll keep posting talks as we have them. If there are topics you'd like to see, or topics you'd like to present, please email us!