Section 12.3. An Initial Plan

12.3. An Initial Plan

After discussions, it was agreed that using Fit to put customer tests in place would be a good step forward. This was a part of a larger process of introducing agile development techniques into RPS.

One of the more skeptical people had a good question: "How do we know if we've made an improvement?" This seemed a good time to consider the business goals. Here are some that were decided on, although no statistics have been kept for some of these goals.

• Have all customers eager to move to the latest version of RentEz, so as to cut the cost of maintaining several versions.

• Reduce the time taken to add new features, to help sales and to reduce costs.

• Improve the estimates of the effort to add possible new features.

• Improve current customer satisfaction.

• Reduce the number of complaints of problems with RentEz.

These goals turn into several more detailed goals for software development.

• Reduce the number of bugs reported from the field.

• Reduce the number of bugs yet to be fixed.

• Reduce the time spent in finding the cause of bugs and fixing them.

• Reduce the effort spent on developing extensions that require drastic rework.

• Reduce the overtime and the stress of last-minutes rushes to get software out, to avoid missing faults that are then picked up by the users.

• Focus the effort on the changes that help sell the product and are most beneficial to clients.