Agile Software Development

AccuRev has announced that Liberty Financial, one of Australasia's leading specialty finance groups, has already accelerated its software development process by approximately 10 percent since standardizing on AccuRev for agile software change and configuration management.

AccuRev has increased the financial institution's ability to deliver more working software to its operations staff at a fraction of the time it previously took using a less agile SCM tool. Previously, developers may have been impacted for a week at a time during a development stabilization phase where they were unable to continue coding. Additionally, broken builds were a common problem, occurring regularly. Today, with AccuRev, developer productivity is increased dramatically because there is no developer downtime during this stabilization phase. Also, broken builds rarely occur due to automation of the processes, and are resolved much more quickly when they do.

Liberty Financial has also realized significant improvements within its Multi-stage continuous integration environment that utilizes AccuRev with CruiseControl.NET and a virtual build farm based on VMware. AccuRev allows the team to have multiple simultaneous versions of the code base running in different stages of development, whereas prior the team could only manage one. Additional areas where AccuRev benefits the development organization include:

• The team has undertaken more projects, some of which would have previously been impossible.
• Projects are now broken down by issues further refining its projects' processes, providing more control over how much work is being done.
• AccuRev is leveraged to drive development KPIs without the need for additional external tools.
• Administration costs are significantly lower utilizing zero administrators and less than one hour per month.

Greg Bastian, Manager of Architecture and Information Services, Liberty Financial, said, "AccuRev has surpassed our initial requirements and increased development efficiency by approximately 10 percent, with additional gains expected over the coming year. As we prepare to adopt a component-based and service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to drive better reuse of our core services, AccuRev will give us more control over how often those services change."

Philip Roe, General Manager, Technology at Liberty Financial, said, "Our core strength is finance and our focus is on business applications, not technology. AccuRev allowed us to get up and running quickly and not get bogged down into the technicalities of it. Other solutions evaluated may have been less costly up front, but AccuRev is designed to easily adapt to the way we need to work at any given time, easily paying for itself within the first year."

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