Online gambling company Betfair has argued that using
agile development to launch new products has given it a competitive
advantage over its rivals.
Speaking at the City IT financial services forum last week,
Rorie Devine, chief technology officer of Betfair, said, “We are
going to win and be globally dominant because we are more
agile.”
One of Devine’s key programmes this year has been is to increase
the proportion of projects that are managed using agile development
– a software development method that sees developers working
alongside end-users and working on short-turnaround projects.
Devine said about 25% of Betfair’s projects were built using
agile development, while the rest use traditional software
development methods.
One of the reported benefits of using agile development is that
the approach is supposed to deliver applications that match
business needs more closely than software that has been developed
with less frequent input from business sponsors.
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