With Oracle MSCE fast approaching (February 13-15, 2017), I thought a TBT post discussing Oracle and Agile would be appropriate. Visit us in San Jose at booth #308!
Last week I discussed Oracle's use of Agile PLM at Sun in my article "Oracle's Death Star for CAD based PLM". While I am done with the Star Wars motif and Open World I wanted to expand on the theme of "eating your own dog food". According to my exhaustive research (typing origins of eating your own dog food on Google) the source of this saying is in some dispute. The most entertaining version was a story about a dog food company sales representative back in the 50's in England actually opening a can of his company's product and eating it to show skeptical grocers how great the product was and why they should stock it. A more current version sites an email from a Microsoft manager challenging other managers at Microsoft to increase internal usage of the company's products. I am pretty sure this is at least the origins of the term in the high tech industry. It is a somewhat overused cliché that refers to companies using their own products as a means of demonstrating their effectiveness. Based on my observations I think more importantly it allows companies to share experiences with their customers and gain better insight into the benefits and shortcomings of their technology. While at Oracle Open World I attended a different presentation also given by Shane Goodwin, Product Manager for Agile PLM where he discussed Oracle's adoption of Agile PLM to actually control software development tasks internally and while he openly admits that they have some work to do before the product is fully capable of managing software development I think it is a positive step forward. In this article I will review the overall benefits companies like Oracle realize from adopting their own technology and specifically what this means for managing software development in Agile PLM.
Before we take a deeper dive into Oracle's adoption of Agile PLM to manage software development we should understand the significance and value of a company using their own technology and what that means for their customers. Last week I discussed the situation at Sun Microsystems and the ultimate benefit realized by moving Sun on to the Agile platform. I think the more important benefit for Oracle was that they were able to see first-hand some of the issues around their engineering collaboration module. Prior to the Sun experience Oracle/Agile had struggled mightily to satisfy end users with their functionality around managing CAD data. I also know from first hand discussions with Sun engineers that they were very resistant to the idea of moving off of their legacy platform. What followed was a spirited exchange of ideas that resulted in Oracle and their partner xPLM making much needed changes to the product. It is not an accident that we now have a much more robust solution in this area. I would expect similar results from this new foray into utilizing Agile PLM as a software development management platform. To paraphrase Shane's comments at Oracle Open World in the presentation, the Agile PLM team has been using Agile for Software Product Management (around documentation for software development) since 2002. Oracle is implementing that use case and a software project management use case in additional groups. Today, and for the past 10 years, the Agile PLM team has used their management capability to demonstrate to customers during audits that they are in control of their development processes. The underlying reason behind this is really about how information is communicated within companies. Many times the people doing product development within a company are far removed from the end users of the technology and there are disconnects when trying to convey how to make the product better. The more filters between the development team and the end users the less likely the company will get things right. Using the product internally shortens the communication chain and gives a company more direct feedback about their solutions. Moreover, the stakes become higher when the capability of the solution directly affects a company's bottom line like it did in the case of Sun.
In August of 2010 we conducted a design study on mechatronics and concluded that the interest in this area was still immature. To date none of the major PLM vendors has a great story to tell about how to effectively manage software and hardware together in the same system. Our take was that integration points between software development solutions like Eclipse, Clear Case and SVN would be the most feasible way to handle this use case. The Oracle presentation at Open World demonstrates to me that there is a possibility of utilizing Agile PLM to manage the entire product data structure which may include software or firmware. I have included Shane's slides which show how Oracle uses Agile PLM today to manage software development and release of Agile PLM itself. They do still use external bug tracking software that they leverage alongside Agile PLM in a non-integrated fashion and other organizations inside of Oracle use various means to track their own software development. The interesting point Shane brought up at a recent meeting with another client was that the Agile PLM group is now working to expand the usage of AgilePLM to other software development teams inside of Oracle and to make some modifications to Agile PLM that would allow these groups to better leverage the software for their software development activities. The idea is to leverage the functionality in the base product configuration module alongside the Product Portfolio Management (PPM) module to track milestone delivery and to capture documentation from their Agile scrum and waterfall project methodologies to facilitate project management and product releases. Obviously it will be quite some time before this migrates into an actual product for external users but Shane has shared how they are using the product today to manage software releases and there is nothing particularly exotic about the elements of Agile PLM they employ to accomplish these tasks. As he says in the presentation it is not meant to be the standard for how to manage software in Agile PLM but is merely how Oracle is using the tool and if others can also benefit from this approach then the information is available.
I think this approach is very helpful both to Oracle and their clients. In a previous article titled "Do too many Cooks spoil the broth?" I discussed how challenging it can be to collect input from prospects and customers for product development. The conclusion was that a blend of internal and external feedback is the best mix for driving new features in products and I think Oracle's internal use of Agile PLM and their willingness to publicize this methodology sets the stage for being able to develop an effective solution for how to blend software development management into PLM both for Mechatronics and pure software design. So while "eating your own dog food" might be a hackneyed overused cliché in our industry I see real value coming from Oracle's internal initiatives both at Sun and for managing their own software development environments.
[Edit: repost from 2010]
