July 16, 2008
Atlanta, GA As head of one of the leading Agile development organizations in the world, and an advocate and teacher of the methodology, Rob Walsh, President and Chief Architect of EnvisionWare, is regularly invited to speak at conferences around the world. Walsh is an accomplished software architect, speaker, and author on a range of topics related to software and testing. He has been invited to speak on “Software Testing in an Agile Environment,” at the JAOO developer conference in Aarhus, Denmark in September of this year. Walsh will be on a tour of Europe to explore new technologies, speak, and to collaborate with some of EnvisionWare’s strategic partners. Information about the conference is available at http://jaoo.dk/speaker/Robert+Walsh. Walsh offered these comments, “Our success in the rapid delivery of new products and features to meet our customer’s needs in the most widely adopted self service technologies for libraries around the world, is a testament to the guiding principles of Agile development. I practice and share the Agile principles because they provide exceptional customer satisfaction for our global community of users.”
EnvisionWare adopted the Agile development philosophy in 2002. Agile provides, as the name says, AGILITY. The Company creates a quarterly release plan and then works in two-week iterations to define and develop products and enhancements. The result is frequent releases of small sets of new features across a broad product line. Another fundamental of the process is test-driven development. A developer starts by writing a test asserting successful behavior in a product. This test initially fails since the new functionality does not yet exist. Code is then written to perform the task, thus allowing the test to pass. There are roughly the same numbers of lines of code in the test code as there are in production code. This means that the Agile developers can make dramatic changes and still be assured that all prior functionality is retained. The product tests itself. Newer EnvisionWare products are the result of the complete Agile process and older generation designs are incorporating the new code in phases.
EnvisionWare is the world’s largest supplier of end-to-end self-service solutions. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, EnvisionWare excels at technical innovation and customer support. The EnvisionWare RFID and AMH solutions are built on open standards. EnvisionWare is the largest provider of turnkey end to end self service solutions for libraries. Today, more public libraries use EnvisionWare PC Management products than any other solution.
