Solertium explains why you should engage clients in the dev process

Posted by Jon Friedman on Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 09:44 AM

Assembla customers like how easy it is to give customers visibility into the development process. But why is this important? Why should companies want to engage customers in the development process?

We heard some answers to this question in a recent conversation with Rob Heittman, CTO of Solertium. Solertium has built up a competitive edge around close engagement with customers, agile processes that deliver software that meets real customer needs, and Assembla workspaces.

Solertium wrote the software that lets you order lunch on your Android device from Five Guys Burgers and Fries, and vote on the best frequent flyer program at the Frequent Traveler Awards web site.

Protected Planet use this

The company is best known for creating conservation applications for global non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These include the Red List of Threatened Species™ for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the Project Planet Ocean Portal for the IUCN and Google.

So how does customer participation in the development process help with these goals?

1) Engaged customers gain confidence that the development team is getting work done and staying on schedule.

2) Customers can give feedback promptly and really fill the role of “product owners” (versus having developers try to play stand-in and interpret customer requirements from a distance).

3) Customers update themselves, instead of sucking up the time of team leaders with status reports.

According to Rob: “customers get a sense of velocity and activity” by viewing emails, activity streams, tickets and milestones.

Further: “they can jump in and give immediate feedback if we didn’t exactly understand their requirements.”

Also: “I save a lot of time because I don’t need to schedule endless status reviews or spend hours writing status emails.”

Rob warned that transparency is not for everyone: “it makes you more accountable.”

But if you can handle the transparency, he said, “your customers will be much more loyal, and much happier because they will get software that really meets their requirements.”

Solertium is also a technology leader. They use Gerrit to accept and review contributions from their global development team. Rob tried Assembla's Gerrit release and noted "I can see immediately one killer advantage of the Assembla Gerrit solution: code review activity appears in the Stream. We use the Stream to get a visceral feel for velocities across projects, and sometimes there is lots of activity going on in code review that was largely invisible. There are also cases where, if a contributor knew there was activity in code review, they would weigh in on it. The Stream integration allows that kind of spotting. Great stuff!"

Tags: software business, case studies, git/gerrit

COMMENTS

The advantages of involving clients in the development process are fairly obvious. The trick is getting them involved.

The vast majority of clients, in my experience, do not want to be involved. They regard it as difficult and a 'waste' of time. They would really rather buy a shrink wrapped software box, install it, and start working on THEIR problems. Buying custom software is second best: they accept there will be a delay while something special is built for them, but they do not expect to be distracted by a lot of strange software engineering problems.

I sometimes think that everyone who is at all intrigued by software engineering already is a software engineer, or wannabee. Clients come from a completely different population.

A slick project management site like Assembla helps, a little, in getting clients involved, but it is not nearly enough to answer the question: "Why should I bother, that's what I am paying you for!"

posted @ Thursday, March 10, 2011 10:13 AM by James Bremner

Hey, this is great! Assembla has been working very well for us, and we've been impressed at how accessible and understandable our customers find it. It's been a great tool for increasing their involvement, and all that extra information helps us get to the acceptance point a lot faster. And it's like this big circle of goodness - because the customers are comfortable with it, they are faster to comment on our tickets. Because they're commenting and giving us feedback, we jump on their stuff faster. They're motivated when they see new things getting pushed out all the time, and we're motivated because they're involved. So everybody is happy and work is getting done. =)

posted @ Thursday, March 10, 2011 12:36 PM by Alison Heittman

@James - As a team, we're not very good at engaging a reluctant or distant customer. We do work very well with folks who are experts in their own fields, understand what they need to develop and why, and want to be involved as peers and partners. I know we're really fortunate to work with customer counterparts who are like that. Jim Ragle at IUCN and Steve Teller at Five Guys come to mind immediately. They're great, super involved, and I always enjoy working with them.

The vast majority of our business comes from referrals. So the way we do things -- here, providing transparency via Assembla -- is an organic part of our "sales pitch." Our existing good customers tell the story of their engagement to future good customers. So we're not really convincing anyone to do things our way; they're seeking us out because they want to do things that way. The self-selection process has been working well for us.

We might see things quite differently if we were supporting a larger team, working on smaller projects, or otherwise had a different economic balance. But certainly Assembla has been the hands-down best tool we've found to support the communication style we prefer.

posted @ Thursday, March 10, 2011 2:46 PM by Rob Heittman

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