August 6, 2005

Atomic Object collaborated with Swedish IT consultants to improve competitiveness of Swedish software development

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August 6, 2005

Grand Rapids, MI – Carl Erickson, President of Atomic Object, and developers from Swedish IT consulting firm Citerus AB, collaborated to teach a course in software craftsmanship and agile software development processes.

The course, which is expected to be offered on a regular basis by Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, offers an alternative model for software development. The goal is to teach practices that will increase the effectiveness and therefore competitiveness of Swedish software developers.

According to Erickson, “The traditional software engineering approach attempts to eliminate the complicated human element of software development by formalizing a heavyweight process and concentrating on up-front planning, analysis and design. While this approach might makes sense for projects requiring hundreds or even thousands of person-years of effort, most software development done today for business is done by small teams in projects lasting at most a year or two. The result of trying to apply software engineering to this work is seen in the dismal status quo of IT projects today: over budget, over deadline, and often completely abandoned.”

With the accelerating trend of globalization of service industries, software development is under pressure in advanced economies to increase their competitiveness. Software craftsmanship offers a way forward to retain software development work done in countries like Sweden and the US.

According to Erickson, “Software craftsmanship acknowledges the individual and team aspects of our work. Agile practices such as test driven development, short iterations, continuous integration, refactoring, and continuously working systems are the natural process equivalents to the software craftsmanship model. Agile methods such as Scrum or Extreme Programming significantly reduce IT project risk and improve both the suitability and quality of the software produced. Agile methodologies require close coupling and communication both within the team and with the customer. They are particularly effective for projects with a high degree of requirements uncertainty and change.”

Citerus developers coached student teams while they worked on a project to put the agile development practices taught in the course to work.

“Our consultants work on a daily basis as coaches out in the reality of development groups at Lantmateriet, Ongame, and in other large Swedish organizations,” says Gustaf Brandberg, President of Citerus. “For us it’s fun to use our experience to help the next generation of developers get a running start, particularly since all our consultants got their technical training at Uppsala University.”

About Atomic Object LLC

Atomic Object provides integrated technology services including software development, consulting, and training. Atomic Object has honed an effective, disciplined development process for the production of high quality software. This process has proven particularly effective in applications with a high degree of uncertainty and rapidly evolving requirements. Atomic Object’s collective experience spans diverse application domains such as human resources, disease management, data acquisition/analysis, network monitoring, and business process automation.

Atomic Object is a limited liability company registered in the state of Michigan.

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Contact:

Atomic Object
Carl Erickson
+1 616 776 6020
CarlErickson@atomicobject.com

Citerus
Gustaf Brandberg VD
+46 018-430 18 21
gustaf.brandberg@citerus.se www.citerus.se