What is Agile Development, and how to apply it to Crestron Programming?
Hi, I’m Niko from A-knowledge. Now, what is agile development, and how can we apply it ti Crestron program? Let’s tart off with an example. We’re doing a residential install with typical aspects. We’re doing lighting, AV, shades and security. In a classic development approach, often referred to as a waterfall, you would have one analysis phase, for all of these aspects combined. What happens then is after 50% of the work is done, is when you start developing and even later in the process you’re, for the first time, actually showing stuff on a touch panel and including your customer with it.
What we see in waterfall classic development approach is that by the end of the project there’s a discussion about scope, what has to be delivered or what did the customer expect to be delivered. What happens then is that there opens up discussion around budget, which pushes back deadlines. In an agile development process, we’re gonna split up that functionality into smaller pieces of functionality together with the customer. We’re gonna do lighting and for lighting alone we’re gonna do an analysis phase, a design, a development and a test phase. We are going to deliver that lighting bid to the customer, and involve him in that development team in the decision making process. When the customer is fully satisfied and he had the opportunity to come up with new features, to maybe expand on that lighting a bit, then we’re going to progress to the next stage, which might be shades. And, gain, for shades we are going to go over all these fases and include the customer in that delivery process.
What we achieve with agile development in a Crestron environment is that by the end of the project the customer was so much involved in that scope that he’s satisfied and actually know what has to be delivered, and there’s less discussion about budget and deadlines.
