The Jonah Group

• Overview
• Methodology
• Why The Jonah Group?
• Our Record
• Repeatable Method
• Agile Process
• Focused Teams
• Culture of Delivery
• Experience

Agile Process

The core value of our process is to "be as agile as you can be". We use modern, lightweight tools and employ continuous integration and frequent delivery practices to support this value.

Be As Agile as you can be

• Using our method we have successfully implemented many large mission-critical business systems.
• We choose lightweight, web-based tools wherever possible. Software development is a delicate balance of often competing processes including time management, project planning, configuration management, reporting, communication, issue resolution, quality control, and of course, development and testing. Unwieldy tools and processes not only obstruct the path to completion, but also upset this balance.
  
  Our tools are effective, manageable, and transparent with respect to task execution:
  • A continuously updated, web-based project extranet for each project to manage news, contacts, bugs, documents, change requests, action items, mockups, and meeting minutes; This is an invaluable tool for our projects and clients, supporting effective real-time collaboration and control, and "on-the-fly" communications across the project.
  • Portable, lightweight configuration / build tools and scripts
  • A remotely accessible, secure version control system for all project artifacts
  • A web-based time tracking system in support of accounting, reporting, budgeting, and planning
  • A word processor and UML diagram tool to capture requirements and technical designs
  • VPN connectivity to allow out-of-office work
• The Jonah Group employs easy-to-understand project plans, organized by use case, and delivered early in the process. We use project plans primarily for cost and time estimation in the early stages, and later only for high-level progress reporting. The reasons for this are twofold:
  • The effort required to keep a large, detailed, project plan up to date often exceeds that of an individual team member's effort to implement his tasks in the plan.
  • It is very difficult to quantify precisely what percentage of any given task is complete.
• We track progress at the task level, but at a low level of granularity. We mitigate the risk of relying on frequently updated, erroneous progress numbers in a development plan by employing continuous integration and frequent delivery to judge progress.
• Only when a feature is running reliably in production and delivering value do we claim that it is 100% complete. In other words, working software is the primary measure of progress (see The Agile Manifesto).