FileMaker as a tool for Agile Development
@March 16, 2020
When I was in college I had the rare opportunity to hear the late Stephen Jay Gould, a renowned Harvard paleontologist and best-selling author, give a lecture concerning the intersection of science and technology. At that time, the human genome had just been mapped and the science world was a buzz with new fields emerging, such as bioinformatics, which utilized the very brightest minds in both computer science and biology. At my incessant urging, one of my classmates stood up and asked Dr. Gould what his thoughts were on irreducibly complex theories. I’ll never forget his response. After a brief chuckle, he paused, and said, “I don’t believe in them.”
Framed within the context of science, an irreducibly complex theory is one in which the presumption is made that certain biological systems cannot evolve by successive small modifications to pre-existing functional systems. In business, we call this Waterfall Methodology. Waterfall is a linear-based project management approach where stakeholder requirements are completely gathered at the beginning of a project, or the discovery phase, and then sequential planning is used to accommodate these requirements. This is precisely how a lot of software has been developed for decades. And it is precisely the wrong way to develop software in the twenty-first century.
Most of us are familiar with the terms ‘Lean’ and ‘Agile’. But, we really don’t know what they truly mean, much less how to implement them into our business workflows. A typical lean company, which owes much of its history to the good folks at Toyota in the 1920’s, is overly concerned with waste, which can loosely be defined as any activity that does not create value for the customer. By driving waste out of your company, you can not only boost creativity from your workforce, but you can altogether eliminate some of the thorns in the modern business side: bureaucracy, pointless meetings, complicated hierarchy, excess and unmanaged inventory. You do this by utilizing the Agile Development process, which, at its very core, can be broken down into three principles:
- Iterative Development
- Risk Management
- Transparency
Iterative Development can be categorized by a project being broken down into small, iterative chunks, that are built rapidly and feedback through testing is often, maybe every one or two weeks. FileMaker is an excellent tool for this style of development because, rather than a team of developers taking months to code, many iterations of software can be built in FileMaker by a single developer very, very quickly. Changes are made rapidly and there isn’t a lot of time and financial resources invested in possibly going down the wrong development path. This keeps, not only developers, but clients and customers happy.
A Risk in terms of project management is anything that could prevent that project’s ultimate success. By definition then, Risk Management is concerned with mitigating any negative extenuating circumstances that threaten the health of the project. While traditional project management methodologies try to account for risk upfront, Agile looks for risk at every step of the iterative development process. If there is a risk, it will get caught and remedied much more quickly in this process. If you’re physically sick, is it better for your overall health to check for a fever hourly or once per week?
Lastly, we can discuss Transparency. Without oversimplifying it, transparency al- lows all of the stakeholders involved to be able to get a bird’s eye view of the project so the bigger picture is ever-present. With an IDE, such as FileMaker, you can utilize FileMaker Server and provide read-only access to all of your stakeholders so they are constantly abreast of the development progress being made.
In conclusion, if your company uses a tool like FileMaker, you’ll not only be able to create a lean workflow through the use of an agile development process, you’ll miti- gate any unnecessary risks that are inherent in development projects. FileMaker is an exceptional IDE in that it adheres to every principle of agile development and sup- ports a lean workflow above all else. There simply isn’t anything else on the market quite comparable.
