Keeping IT project costs down has never been more important.  At the same time, customers expect high quality results for a superior value.  Delivering on that, regardless of company size, requires a formula and discipline.  At QAT, our formula works and it’s repeatable.  It works because of great enterprise architecture, well-defined development standards and discipline with our Scrum methodology, Agility RPM?.  It’s repeatable because we’ve developed a full curriculum of developer training and we can deliver that training to our best-shore teams as well as our clients for repeated success.

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Depending on the size of a project, we could spend weeks or months developing detailed specifications that could be turned over to the development team in hopes that we get something great back several months later.   We could do that, but we don’t because it doesn’t work.  It doesn’t work because it takes far too much time and cost to get it right and even when you think you have it, the business conditions and priorities change and all that hard work goes back to the drawing board, usually at substantial cost.  User stories and corresponding user interface designs are the requirements in Agility RPM?.  The product owner writes these user stories from their perspective and they represent the smallest increment of functionality that is meaningful to them that can be demonstrated by the development team.   The Scrum team is then responsible for self-organizing around the stories to provide the solution.  Daily Sprint meetings are used to keep the solution in line with expectations.  If things start going down the wrong path, they are caught and corrected quickly because of this frequent communication.  provides for iterative software delivery from a team that organizes around a set of user stories that get defined and prioritized by the product owner.  Daily meetings are used to communicate the needs, monitor progress, remove blocks and keep the team and the requirements on track.  The software is demonstrated every 4-6 weeks and the success of the entire team is incrementally measured by these demonstrations.  Detailed specifications are not produced unless required by the client.