Agile Cooperation is a concept that originated from the Agile software development movement in the early 2000s. The Agile Manifesto, published in 2001, introduced a new approach to software development that prioritizes collaboration, flexibility, and customer value. As Agile practices became more widespread, it became evident that close collaboration and communication between departments, such as business stakeholders, developers, and operations, were crucial to the success of any Agile project.

One of the Agile Principles from the Agile Manifesto states that “business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” This led to the development of the Agile Cooperation concept, which emphasizes the significance of business and IT working together to deliver value to the customer. While daily Agile Cooperation is commonly implemented on the technical side, cooperation between technical and business teams is often overlooked. Over time, Agile Cooperation has evolved to include various practices and tools, including regular meetings, cross-functional collaboration, and the sharing of best practices and tools between IT teams. However, few of these practices focus on the cooperation between business and IT.

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is one methodology that provides a vision for Agile Cooperation between business and IT. SAFe provides a useful framework for managing software development and delivery at scale across the entire organization. However, SAFe is complex and challenging to implement in a lasting manner. The success of any Agile methodology depends on the people involved and their ability to work together effectively, just like any other Agile methodology.

Breaking Silos with Agile Cooperation

Achieving Agile Cooperation between business and IT departments is essential for tearing down barriers between silos in a software development organization. It allows teams to collaborate and coordinate their efforts effectively and deliver value to the customer in a predictable and repeatable way. By working together, departments can share knowledge, tools, and best practices and align their priorities to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.

On the other hand, rigid adherence to processes and practices, without considering the maturity level, needs, and goals of the departments involved, can result from strictly following a methodology like SAFe. This can lead to decreased motivation, reduced collaboration, and a lack of innovation, negatively affecting the quality and delivery of the end product.

Starting Small with Agile Cooperation

The first step in implementing Agile Cooperation is for technical and business teams to come together and define their shared vision and goals. This should involve a collaborative process where both teams can discuss their needs, priorities, and expectations, leading to a shared understanding of their daily operations and aligned vision and objectives.

Regular meetings, similar to the PI Planning meeting in SAFe, can facilitate Agile Cooperation by bringing business stakeholders and developers together to align on priorities, resolve cross-team dependencies, and plan for the next iteration. By working closely together, both parties can build trust, understand each other’s perspectives, and work together effectively to deliver value to the customer.

Starting small and focusing on a meaningful operational topic for both teams can help cultivate a culture of collaboration and trust. By working together on topics that are important to both, business stakeholders and developers can build relationships, understand each other’s perspectives, and work together effectively to deliver value to the customer.

In a software development company, it is common to see silos between departments such as sales, consultants, software development, and support. These silos can hinder communication, collaboration, and result in a lack of understanding of each department’s objectives and priorities.

For a software development company to be successful, it is essential to break down these silos and foster a culture of collaboration and cooperation. This will result in a better flow of information and a more integrated approach to problem-solving, leading to improved project outcomes and increased customer satisfaction.

Implementing Agile Cooperation and Intelligent DevOps can be a solution to break down the silos between your sales, consultantcy, software development, and support teams. By utilizing these methodologies, you will increase collaboration and communication, align department goals with company objectives, and ultimately drive success.

Understanding Silos in Software Companies

In software development companies, silos refer to the lack of communication and collaboration between the software team(s) and the sales, support and\or consultancy teams. These silos often form due to misunderstanding, lack of knowledge of the current topics a team is working on, or the absence of a unified company culture. The common causes of silos in software development companies include poor communication systems, lack of cross-team collaboration opportunities, and siloed incentives that drive departments to work in isolation.

This silo mentality can have a major impact on the productivity and innovation of the company. Teams that operate in silos are less likely to share knowledge and ideas, which can lead to duplicated efforts, inefficiencies, and slower problem-solving. Furthermore, silos can create a competitive atmosphere between departments, causing tension and slowing down the company’s overall progress. The inability to effectively collaborate also limits the potential for breakthrough ideas and solutions, hindering a company’s ability to stay ahead of the competition and drive growth.

Agile Cooperation: A Key Approach to Breaking Down Silos

Agile Cooperation is a key approach that can help break down these silos and create a more collaborative and efficient work environment. Agile Cooperation is an approach that emphasizes teamwork and collaboration, as well as continuous improvement and adaptability.

The key principles of Agile Cooperation include continuous feedback and improvement, cross-functional collaboration, and a focus on delivering value to the customer. In a software development company, these principles can be applied to a variety of teams, including sales, consultancy, software development, and support. For example, the sales team and the software development team can work together to better understand the needs of the customer and to ensure that the software being developed is aligned with their needs. The consultancy team can work with the support team to provide ongoing training and support to ensure that the software is being used effectively.

By embracing Agile Cooperation, software development companies can break down the silos that can prevent teams from working together effectively. By fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, companies can increase their productivity, improve their ability to innovate, and deliver better value to their customers.

Intelligent DevOps: Automating Collaboration for Better Results

Intelligent DevOps is a modern approach to software development and delivery that emphasizes collaboration, automation, and integration. This methodology aims to improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of software development by breaking down silos between different teams and departments. In a software development company, the integration of Intelligent DevOps can bring significant benefits to the cooperation between development teams, consultants, and support, as well as to the customer experience.

Key benefits of Intelligent DevOps for software development companies include less stress in the team prior to a release, higher quality software, improved collaboration between teams, and greater transparency and control over the development process. By automating collaboration, Intelligent DevOps also helps to reduce errors and improve consistency and speed in software development.

To implement Intelligent DevOps in a software development company, it is important to adopt best practices such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous testing. This involves setting up an automated pipeline for software development, testing, and delivery, which can help to ensure that software is delivered faster and with higher quality. By automating collaboration, Intelligent DevOps also helps to reduce the risk of misunderstandings between teams, improve the speed of decision-making, and promote a more efficient and productive work environment.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft shared its Responsible AI Standard, a framework to guide the development of AI systems. The goal of the framework is to proactively guide decisions about AI systems towards more beneficial and equitable outcomes, by keeping people and their goals at the center of system design decisions and respecting values such as fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.

The Responsible AI Standard provides specific, actionable guidance for Microsoft’s teams, with concrete goals and outcomes that teams must strive to achieve, breaking down broader principles into key enablers and providing resources and tools to help teams succeed. The framework is an important step in building better, more trustworthy AI and in earning society’s trust.

This announcement comes as AI is becoming more and more a part of our lives, and the need for practical guidance on responsible AI development is growing. Microsoft recognizes its responsibility to act, and to work towards ensuring that AI systems are responsible by design, in the absence of laws that have yet to catch up with AI’s unique risks and society’s needs.

OpenAI, another company working on AI alignment, takes a similar approach to responsible AI development. They also use an empirical and iterative approach, constantly working to improve their AI systems’ ability to learn from human feedback and to assist humans in evaluating AI. They also focus on training AI systems using human feedback, and training AI systems to assist human evaluation, and training AI systems to do alignment research themselves.

Both Microsoft and OpenAI recognize the importance of keeping people and their goals at the center of AI system design decisions, and the need to respect values such as fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. The responsible AI frameworks and best practices developed by these companies can serve as valuable resources for software teams looking to implement responsible AI in their own work.: 

One of the biggest apps in The Netherlands, DigiD, with 15 million active users, has been open-sourced. This is a huge milestone in the software development industry, and we’re even more excited to learn that the app is built using Microsoft technology and Xamarin.Forms.

According to Logius, the decision to open-source the DigiD app was made in line with government policy to promote transparent government. Logius works actively but in a controlled manner on the release of source code, and after a request under the Dutch Open Government Act (“Wet open Overheid”), Logius started investigating the publication of DigiD. In an open process with the requester, Logius has examined how the DigiD app can be released responsibly. The source code of the DigiD app is now published as a snapshot, a ‘picture’ of the source code at a certain point in time. In a next phase, it will be investigated whether the DigiD software that runs at Logius can also be released.

It is also important to note that Logius maintains a careful approach in publishing source code to ensure that the software continues to work safely and reliably. Transparency and security are important values of the digital government, as stated in the Work Agenda Digitization of State Secretary Van Huffelen. This also applies to software developed by the government. Publication of the source code contributes to this transparency and allows for greater scrutiny of the app’s security and privacy measures. We also believe that this move towards transparency and trust will foster more collaboration and innovation in the software development industry.

As a company that specializes in cross-platform mobile and web app development, Xablu is committed to keeping track of the developments in this area and providing updates as necessary. If you have any questions about this Open Government Act decision or about our services, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via our contact form.

Find the source code of the DigiD app on Github!