As agile development has become globally accepted as a best practice, 1901 Group has refined the approach to the design, development, implementation, and sustainment methodology to balance the pros and cons associated a more agile environment. The approach views that successful agile development depends on effectively managing three associated capabilities:

1. Ability to objectively, with quantitative metrics, continuously monitor incremental progress.
2. Ability to efficiently and cost effectively allocate (pull from outside current skill-set pools), and/or reallocate (pull from inside current skill-set pools) development and test expertise as development increments require.
3. Ability to manage funding issues within procurement periods or task orders, as well as, across calendar or fiscal year limitations.

1901 Group is experienced with decreasing the time it takes to get software releases into production, improving system performance by directly engaging the customer throughout the development process, mitigating risk by breaking the development processes into smaller pieces of development, and decreasing costs.

1901 Group has adopted “Agile Development”, and the resulting life cycle that consists of planning, requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, sustainment of software and software systems. We recognize that “Agile Development” is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies, including but not limited to: Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Lean Development, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD).

While every agile method is somewhat honed for a specific environment, requirements, and approaches, most share a common vision and core value of delivering greater performance and quality through incremental progress as opposed to traditional methodologies that entail longer, larger or complete development milestones.

We use a metaphor of an IT Development Factory to express our staffing and methodology that fundamentally incorporates the “sprint” iteration that is used in Agile Development with continuous feedback to provide a nimble process of incremental progress and refinement. In essence, our approach institutionalizes pragmatic continuous planning, continuous testing, continuous integration, and continuous evolution at every point pursuant to an approved segment of work or “sprint”. Our approach is lightweight (especially compared to traditional waterfall-style processes), and inherently adaptable which allows personnel to individually or collectively reflect and collaborate, so as to make decisions quickly and effectively.

By combining old and new ideas into incremental refinements and work performance, the end product is greater than the sum of its parts, and 1901 Group:
• Currently utilizes this agile methodology to provide various levels of development, implementation, and sustainment / operations for 27 applications for the U.S. Army under a single program effort.
• Utilizes a methodology that is platform agnostic.
• Utilizes a methodology that entails parallel development and implementation/operations paths.