Technology to Track Stolen Vehicles Track & Found, Inc. (TFI), a leading vehicle tracking and recovery company, had grow

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Technology to Track Stolen
Vehicles
Track & Found,
Inc. (TFI), a leading vehicle tracking and recovery company, had
grown significantly over the past 10 years due to high demand for
its systems for insurance purposes. The company was aware that its
entire product offering was reliant on information and
communication technology capabilities, so it restructured its IT
department into a “DevOps” organization to promote DevOps software
development methodology. The restructure split the IT department
into two teams, one for development (50 employees) and one for
operations (30 employees). The department’s more experienced and
better qualified programmers and engineers were placed in the
development team; its less-qualified and newly-hired college grads
were put in the operations team. Because the company was growing so
quickly, the two teams had to be placed in different buildings
located a considerable distance apart.
TFI executive
management approached SoftTech Engineers, a reputable software
engineering company with which it had had a longstanding
relationship, to assist its own development team in developing a
new tracking application (called “TFIApp”) to be used by vehicle
response teams in conjunction with TFI’s existing tracking solution
to recover stolen vehicles more quickly and accurately. SoftTech
was included in the project because it possessed development skills
and knowledge that TFI did not, plus it had agile project
management experience that TFI management felt could benefit the
project. TFI’s development team had no such experience and expected
SoftTech would provide guidance.
In the TFIApp
project, SoftTec would create software for the GPS-based tracking
application, the TFI team would create hardware to add
functionality to the vehicle receiver unit, and SoftTec would
integrate the hardware and software. SoftTec was capable of also
developing hardware, but in the interest of the DevOp methodology
TFI management gave the task to its own development team to
encourage a close working relationship with the operations team.
SoftTec divided work for both hardware and software components of
the system into a series of two-week sprints. Completion of each
sprint would be followed by a demonstration to TFI management. In
dividing up the work, the TFIApp project manager, who worked for
SoftTec, made sure that virtually all of his own team’s work could
be done independently of the development team’s work (he had
learned from prior experience that TFI’s IT department could not be
expected to stick to plans). The teams would not have to work
together until integration at the end of the project.
The SoftTec team’s
work progressed smoothly and it completed the intended deliverables
of every sprint for the TFIApp software on time, on budget, and
according to specifications. Unfortunately, however, the TFI
development team completed its deliverables for the first sprint
only. Thereafter it slipped farther and farther behind because it
needed input from the operations team, which, being understaffed,
was in constant fire-fighting mode and had no time to meet with the
development team. As one consequence of “splitting the work,” the
development team had received no training and little guidance in
agile. And the fact that the team was not demonstrating
deliverables every two weeks seems to have been missed by the
SoftTec project manager and TFI management. Neither had shown much
interest in the development team until SoftTec completed its
software application and was preparing for integration with the
development team’s hardware. Upon hearing from SoftTec that the
hardware was not ready, TFI’s IT executive raced to the development
team and demanded an explanation.
Based on the above, answer the
following:
1.What is DevOps? List some characteristics of the DevOps
software development methodology.
2. What might the SoftTec project manager have done differently
to ensure a more successful outcome for the entire project?