A Side Trip to Agile Development

Computerworld - During the past few years, as Sabre Holdings has built out its Web services infrastructure, the company’s IT department has also been moving from traditional waterfall development techniques to an agile development and project management methodology.

Sabre’s approach to agile development draws from other iterative programming techniques such as UML, which focus on managing risks through rapid development, says Sara Garrison, senior vice president of products and systems delivery at Sabre. Time frames for iterations vary but can be as short as a week or two, with close collaboration between users and developers. Benefits of the agile approach include components that can be reused for other projects, she says.

As Sabre began developing a runtime infrastructure in 2004, project iterations would typically start with an inception phase — an evaluation of what Sabre’s products could do in a Web services environment — followed by an elaboration phase, says Andrew Teel, senior principal architect at Sabre.

Next would come development. Most of that work has been done in the U.S., although some of the tools were built by Sabre employees and contractors in Bangalore, India, and Krakow, Poland.

Although the transition has been successful, Sabre has faced a few challenges, says Garrison. For example, typically, the full range of system requirements isn’t fully explored during an agile system development life cycle. User-interface design techniques, for instance, are typically treated separately, and deployment into production isn’t usually addressed, she says. So one of the challenges, Garrison says, was to ensure that the agile process captured the full range of system requirements — “both those tied to business functions and those tied to the underlying stability and durability of the system.”

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