Agile development at Microsoft Dynamics CRM team

I am not a big fan of waterfall software development model for many obvious (and not very obvious) reasons. At the risk of revealing my age, long before I joined Microsoft, I taught software development methodologies at European universities and I must confess, I have never felt very comfortable with that model. Later on I spent a few years managing software projects using Extreme Programming (XP) and frankly they were pretty successful and everyone had more fun while developing good quality software.

In CRM team, we have an endless contest to improve our software development process and be more efficient in delivering outstanding value to our customers.

 

Our leadership team constantly encourages the development team to stretch and find new ways to build solid software. For some time now, we have been practicing agile software development methodologies at CRM. We are currently using Scrum to develop one of the key (and pretty cool!) features of the next version of CRM. We have completed the first sprint and are halfway through the second sprint. The product team is excited about the new process and while there are challenges with Scrum, overall we are getting good value from the process and see a lot of potential for designing and delivering better value software, faster and at a lower cost.

Let me know what worked for your development team…………