About the Shell Method

Problem and Solution

 

 

The Problem

Agile development depends on well-defined, easily understood processes, clear application documentation, and rapid development of applications through close cooperation between end-users, developers, testers, and managers. The amount of effort involved in deploying a complete, auditable, integrated lifecycle that covers project management, verification and validation, configuration management and quality assurance prevents most organizations from even starting down this path. As a result, techniques and methods taught in every CS and IT department around the world are implemented only in large, well-funded organizations, forcing many development teams to work in an ad-hoc, poorly managed environment.

A Solution

The Shell Method™ solves the problem by providing an out-of-the-box, fully defined process and support environment that works for the majority of database-oriented application development efforts without modification, requiring only standard office productivity software and a basic source control application.

Solution Goals

  1. Enable design-controlled development, where developers focus entirely on implementing design elements already understood and approved by the end-user community.
  2. Focus the lifecycle on database-oriented IT applications.
  3. Provide an efficient, best-practices-based application lifecycle management process suitable for small to medium IT development teams.
  4. Enable implementation and execution of the lifecycle using standard office productivity tools and a basic configuration management system.
  5. Minimize the effort involved in developing documentation that is understandable to both the end-user community and the development community.
  6. Provide a standard, publicly-available process repository with a full example documentation stream and supplemental template set to allow rapid initiation for those that are in a real time crunch.
  7. Demonstrate traceability to the majority of CMMI Level 2 and 3 process areas.
  8. Allow basic customization of the process and documentation stream with minimal effort.
  9. Scale to full integration with enterprise-class infrastructure systems including collaboration, modeling, project portfolio management and configuration management systems.

Solution Themes

Shell Method employs two main themes to satisfy these goals:

  1. A CMMI-compatible, auditable, easily-understood standard application development lifecycle that allows developers to hit the ground running without a massive investment in expensive tools and associated training.
  2. A teaming approach that merges the end-user community for an application with the development community supporting that application, based on a simplified documentation stream that make sense to both the end-user and the developer.