Information monitoring company Garlik has used the
latest rapid-programming techniques to develop its anti-ID-fraud
web and database technologies in just nine months.
To get to market quickly, the start-up company rejected the
widely used "waterfall" approach to development, which requires the
specification to be defined before coding begins, in favour of
agile programming techniques. Garlik's founders first applied the
approach at online bank Egg.
Garlik's service alerts consumers to sensitive personal
information on the web and in commercial databases that could be
harvested by identity thieves.
The service, dubbed Datapatrol, is designed to combat a growing
trade in personal data, which is collected electronically by
information brokers to sell on to criminal groups. About 100,000
people a year are affected by identity fraud, Garlik said.
Tom Ilube, chief executive at Garlik and former Egg CIO, said,
"I am pretty certain that if I had taken this on using the
waterfall approach it would not have worked. We were able to
complete the work in nine months from a blank sheet of paper."
Ilube said the project had come together in part due to Garlik's
investment in highly skilled developers, and in part due to its
adoption of agile programming techniques, rather than going for the
lowest cost option of outsourcing the work offshore.
"The idea that the way to maximise your development budget is to
find the lowest-cost people you can is fundamentally flawed," he
said.
"If you are able to reach out and attract the real experts in
the software field and give them real freedom, and have given them
projects that are challenging, you will get much more bang for your
buck than if you offshore."
He said the approach also meant giving the team freedom to make
mistakes. "Essentially what these guys did was start on software
development from day one. They did go down two or three blind
alleys, but they needed to feel very comfortable with that. The
permission to fail was crucial."
Using traditional programming approaches would have meant
spending nine months specifying the project before beginning
coding, said Ilube.
At the heart of the project is a Unix datastore capable of
storing more than two billion data references, known as triples.
These references define relationships between people and their
personal data - for example linking an individual with a bank and a
bank account.
The datastore will run on a cluster of low-cost Dell servers,
which will be expanded as the company takes on more customers.
Garlik expects to offer the data-tracking services to hundreds of
thousands of customers in the UK.
www.agilealliance.org
Garlik's agile programming approach
- Working software was delivered in fortnightly cycles for almost
a year, increasing to weekly cycles in the final two months.
- Involving business people, marketing, testing and developers in
every conversation, whether technical or business strategy.
- Face-to-face conversations wherever possible, plus using VoIP
to bring together the distributed team.
- Leadership consisted of facilitation of conversations, rather
than being task-driven.
- Timing divided into two-weekly time boxes, with deliverables
agreed at the start of each two-week cycle.
- Garlik took responsibility for the outcome and did not use
contractual leverage to manage suppliers.