SAP goes Agile

New York Time’s technology blog reported last week that SAP is adopting Agile development methods to “increase the speed” of product development and release.
 
Now, this news isn’t particularly huge in and of itself. After all, IBM, Yahoo, Microsoft and plenty of other large software companies have been practicing different forms of Agile development for years now.

What struck me was from whom the announcement came. It wasn’t some mid-level manager in development, or the PR department, a senior product development leader or the CTO, or some other VP on the senior management team.

This news came from the new co-CEO’s of the software giant, Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. And it came from them in the context of discussing SAP’s future and its business growth strategies, not product development.

And the message wasn’t just meant for software developers, but for its customers and investors.

The blog reports:

The meatiest example available came from Mr. Snabe, who said that SAP’s on-demand software group has now embraced agile software development methods. Agile coding is a well-known practice in the software industry in which a company relies on smaller teams of developers that constantly refine a product, send it out for testing, take it back and refine it some more in a methodical fashion, as opposed to waiting until a product is fully baked before sending it for customer tests.

SAP employed these agile techniques to fix issues with its much-delayed Business ByDesign software, which got the company into the on-demand business software game -– finally.

Mr. Snabe boasted that SAP cut about a third of the Business ByDesign team — “hundreds of people” — after it was shown that fewer bodies could produce better code at a quicker clip. SAP plans to push these agile methods across the whole software development organization.

 

Another win for Agile, for a business, and most importantly, for its customers.