WFS is a consulting company that helps improve software development processes for medium and large Canadian companies. They assess clients' SDLC practices and prioritize areas for improvement, such as iterative development, continuous integration, and test-driven development. Assessments involve surveys of executives and development teams. The outputs identify strengths and weaknesses, prioritize goals like time to market and quality, and show variances between groups. WFS then provides roadmaps to strengthen practices and better align teams to priority business dimensions to reduce costs and improve ROI of software projects.

1. Web Financial Solutions
The Path to Software Delivery
Excellence
John Munro (416) 505-4756

2. Who are we
 WFS is a Software Development Life-Cycle process
improvement consulting company.
 We work with CIO’s and senior management to improve
Time to Market, improve ROI and reduce risk of software
development projects.
 We focus on medium to large Canadian companies.
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3. What makes WFS unique
 Managed by Project Managers and Application Architects.
 Deep technical skills across our team in security,
application architecture, testing frameworks etc.
 Experience with enterprise clients, Scotia, 3M, The
Dominion etc. Experienced with large teams and complex
system development
 Everything we do has been based on past client success –
which means lower risk for new clients
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4. WFS Pillars: What We Believe
 We believe in Iterative Development
 The SDLC should be managed like any other business
process
 SDLC delivery process should align to prioritized
business dimensions: Time to Value, Cost, Time to Market,
Quality and Predictability.
 SDLC process is a learning process and should be under
continuous improvement
 Improvement should be measured, the measurement
metrics steer where to invest and what to improve
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5. 2009 Business Review
After working in enterprise software development for 15
years we noticed that our clients project success rate was
not improving, costs continued to rise and ROI was
suffering. We approached our clients to see if we could
impact the projects success.
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6. The Agile practice success at one of our clients lead us to
the following assumption:
If our Clients improved their SDLC technical practices they
would be significantly better, over 25%. We achieved 30% with
Continuous Integration with one client.
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7. Testing our Assumption on SDLC Improvement
and results from senior management assessments
SDLC Assessment and Improvement Roadmap
 Using an SDLC Assessment we gather key business drivers and
priorities from the Executive Team and Development Teams
 The Executive Assessment focused on five key business drivers:
1. Time to value
2. Cost
3. Predictability
4. Quality
5. Business value
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8. Our expected result
 WE expected to find the need for
additional SDLC practices which
would shorten cycle times on
software development
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9. What was the survey or assessment and
what did its outputs look like?
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10. SDLC Assessment and Improvement Roadmap
Time-to-Value
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4
Predictability 2 Business Value
0
Quality Cost
Today
3-year goal
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11. Sample of report on ‘Agile Core’
Time boxed iterations
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Collaboration 3 Working Increment
Agile Practices
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 Strengths
Prioritized Backlog Feedback Used •Incorporating user feedback
•Sustainable pace
Estimating
 Weaknesses
•Automated tests
Vision
•Collaboration
User Stories or Use Cases •Time boxed deliverables
Automated Unit Tests
Iterative
Collaboration
Reflections
Non-Solo
Custom
0 1 2 3 4 5
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12. Strengths and Weaknesses for Target Practices
Sl.no Target Practice Strength Weakness
.
1 Agile Process •Shared vision •Automated tests
•Self Directing •Collaboration
teams
2 Iterative Development •Feedback •Iterations not
mechanisms time-boxed
•No formal
iteration plans
3 Design driven •Black-box tests •Automated tests
implementation •Clear design •Evaluate
implementation
4 Independent testing •Test •Automation
infrastructure •Code coverage
See backup for more details on self check assessment results

13. Strengths and Weaknesses for Target Practices
Sl.no Target Practice Strength Weakness
.
5 Test-Driven Development •Incremental •Regression tests
development
6 Component Based •Right people •Defining
involved in independent
architecture decisions interfaces and
services
•Documenting
decisions
7 Continuous Integration •Single developer •Larger projects
projects obviate will require CI
need
See backup for more details on self check assessment results

14. Results of Executive portion of
the Assessments
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15. Prioritization of Improvements (Financial Services)
(N.B. lowest value equates to highest priority)
Note the LARGE standard deviations.

16. Prioritization of improvements (Insurance)
Predictable
Quality
Time to market
Deliver on value
Cost effective
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0
(N.B. lowest value equates to highest priority)
Note the LARGE standard deviation and that the
dimensions deemed the highest priority for
improvement are the same dimensions with the
highest current satisfaction.

17. Prioritization of Improvements (Government)
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18. Conclusions
 Management is not aligned to prioritized business goals
 Which results in software teams not being aligned to
prioritized goals which causes waste in the software
delivery ecosystem
 The waste is seen as missed delivery dates and high cost
of software projects
 Teams have accepted this as ‘normal’ which was
reinforced by team members comments
 Software delivery lacks metrics and is not tied to financial
reporting i.e. ROI is often not measured
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19. Questions or to discuss our approach to SDLC
Improvement?
Contact me either by email
jmunro@webfinancialsolutions.com
or phone
416 505-4756
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