Case Study GroupNBT - the Rewards of Agile

IndigoBlue’s approach meant that we weren’t constrained by our initial concept. The end solution far exceeded our early vision.”

Gerry Lawrence, IT Director, GroupNBT

The Company

GroupNBT is a publicly listed company with a £35m+ annual turnover, 300+ employees and eight offices worldwide. As well as providing domain name management and brand protection services through its NetNames Platinum brand, GroupNBT also offers managed hosting, 3rd party domain registrations, and online domain sales.

Online, self-service capability is a critical part of GroupNBT's domain name management service offering. Their existing web application needed redevelopment due to advances in technical options, and improvements in competitors’ offerings. Having had poor experiences in the past with outsourced development projects, GroupNBT wanted to engage a supplier who could deliver using an Agile approach, providing GroupNBT with continuous visibility of progress, functionality, and quality.

IndigoBlue was selected for their proven delivery record, and also because, as specialists in Agile development at all levels, they were ideally suited to engage appropriately with senior management, train the internal team taking over the delivered product, and support GroupNBT in a wider implementation of Agile.

IndigoBlue Approach

Although a specification had already been produced by GroupNBT, IndigoBlue started the engagement by running workshops to generate definitive objectives, and used these to create an incremental delivery plan, identifying early deliverables that provided business benefit. We also and identified the key areas of functional uncertainty which needed to be addressed early; contingency planning was then based on this uncertainty.

Development occurred in 2-week iterations, with demonstrations to key user representatives at the end of each iteration. Feedback comments were incorporated, and in some cases significant changes of direction occurred. The impact of these changes against the original plan was tracked, including the use of allocated contingency to ensure that the project would meet its original time objectives.

The technology base was .NET, which is GroupNBT’s strategic architecture. The optimum combination of open-source and proprietary tools were selected to support continuous integration and automated unit and acceptance tests.

An additional complication was that the back-end web service interface to existing systems was being developed in parallel, without any automated testing or formal release process. Mechanisms were put in place to protect the front-end development from late delivery of web services, and to automatically detect errors and inconsistencies when releases occurred.

Handover to GroupNBT was achieved through the involvement of their staff in the latter stages of development, and support, training, and mentoring in the architecture process by IndigoBlue after delivery.

Benefits Realised

The key benefit realised by GroupNBT was achieving a solution to met their actual business objectives, through feedback and review and engagement with end users. This would not have resulted from adherence to the initial specification. A major contributor to this was the ability to explore and refine the solution to complex areas of usability design, while maintaining control of the overall plan through clear impact reporting.

The mechanism to protect development from the impact of issues in the parallel back-end development was essential to the ultimate success of the project, which would otherwise have been overwhelmed by an external dependency.

Finally, an important additional value-add for GroupNBT was the establishment of an architecture for achieving high quality, and a vision within the organisation of what is possible in terms of quality.