Pivotal Labs Blog

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.

Ian McFarland and I attended a 2-day Development Forum hosted by OpenView Venture Partners last week in Boston. It's the second year that Pivotal Labs has participated in the event. Open View has a portfolio of companies from all over (Europe, Australia, the US), each of which has been working on implementing Scrum over the past year. The engineering staff from 10 portfolio companies attended the event. Jeff Sutherland (amongst other things the co-creator of Scrum) is a Senior Adviser to OpenView; he provides advice and guidance to the portfolio companies as they progress through their Scrum adoption, and he gave a talk at the Forum. Pivotal Labs was invited to speak and lead a discussion of on 2 core topics: Developer Testing and the Principles of Build.