practice
DOI:10.1145/ 3453932
Article development led by
queue.acm.org
Creating a software solution with fast decision
capability, agile project management, and
extreme low-code technology.
BY JOÃO VARAJÃO
Software
Development
in Disruptive
Times
evident (optimistically, awareness of
them will also become more acute). In
T H E REC ENT PAN D E MI Chas brought challenges other words, crises have always been
rarely seen before. It has made evident a world that part of human evolution, and they
is strongly globalized, capable, and characterized must be seen as inevitable and recur-
ring realities that need quick and ef-
by a high interdependence of resources and means, fective responses. The key is to be pre-
but that is also fragile and has a high potential for pared for them and act accordingly.
As history has so often demon-
contamination—not only in the physical sense but strated, difficult times enhance soci-
also concerning information, ideas, processes, and ety’s ability to adapt, and lead to the
other aspects. search for better solutions. Informa-
tion technologies, which in recent de-
Given the novelty of the situation, one may be cades have revolutionized the lives of
tempted to think this is a unique situation that people and businesses—sometimes
more or less quietly, sometimes with
will soon be overcome, returning eventually to a bang—are inevitable since they pro-
the (apparent) stability that existed previously. vide cost-effective solutions to the
However, the reality indicates this view is, at best, increasingly complex problems of an
interconnected and interdependent
illusory and that we live in an age in which societal world. This is easy to understand from
fragilities and instabilities will be increasingly a simple example: if, in this pandem-
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ic, there had been a global shutdown From Opportunity Awareness others, that provided broad insight
of the technological infrastructure to the Decision to Go Forward into the project’s market potential.
that supports the Internet, the world On March 12, 2020, the coronavirus The response from all teams was
would indeed be experiencing a much outbreak was officially declared a quick and positive, so the company
more complicated and chaotic reality pandemic by the World Health Orga- decided to go forward with the project
than we are living—and it is already nization. On the same day, the CEO one day later, on March 13.
quite difficult for everyone. of Quidgest, a medium-sized software
It is in this context that the software- house, identified the pandemic as an Product, Requirements,
development project described in this opportunity for the company and wrote and Development Milestones
article is worth reporting on since it in- a plan for creating a web-based soft- The product, named VIRVI—Health
volves several disruptive aspects that are ware product, together with a prelimi- Vigilance and Control Software—is
fundamental in a world that requires nary list of requirements (related to presented as “hyper-agile emergency
solutions “thought today” to be “made monitoring, control, innovation man- software for global epidemiologic
available yesterday.” From the point of agement, and eradication of diseases). challenges.” As described by Quidg-
market-opportunity awareness to the This plan was then sent to the sales and est, VIRVI is “an information system
availability of a fully functional soft- marketing teams (both national and aimed at supporting the monitoring
IMAGE BY BLU E PL ANET STUD IO
ware product, this project took three international), as well as the research and control of a virus epidemic, like
weeks to complete and involved several and development teams for feedback. COVID-19, in any country or region,
state-of-the-art practices and tools: fast Note that the sales and marketing in an emergency timeframe (that is,
decision making; agile project manage- teams had developed several contacts starting operating in hours). VIRVI is
ment; and extreme low-code software- with government administrations, robust, reliable, and capable of con-
development technology. hospitals, retirement homes, among tinually evolving, forming the basis for
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practice
good critical management and com- software are the following: registration part-time (5%) people from the mar-
munication facing virus epidemics.” and data collection in a centralized keting team; and four part-time (20%)
As depicted in the timeline in information repository; coordination people from the sales team. Taken to-
accompanying figure, VIRVI evolved among entities involved in responding gether, this corresponds to about 3.25
quickly. On March 12, the project start- to the epidemic, with different access FTEs (full-time equivalents) for the de-
ed with an estimated size of 207 func- levels; monitoring and decision-mak- velopment team and nearly 1.84 FTEs
tion points, which measure software ing in real time; availability of open for the marketing and sales teams dur-
size defined as the amount of business data for external analysis; data visual- ing the three-week development time-
functionality that an information sys- ization, with the provision of indica- line. Considering the total of 1,365
tem (as a product) provides to users; tors, statistics, and maps in real time; function points for the final product,
the complexity level was 941 (according support for official emergency chan- the average weekly productivity of the
to the company’s internal measure that nels; direct communication between analysts/developers/technology expert
takes into account the number of data citizens/entities and health profes- was nearly 220 function points.
tables, data fields, foreign keys, arrays, sionals; and a centralized marketplace Since there was no conventional en-
formulas, forms, form fields, menus, for entities and suppliers. actment of requirements, the project
multilanguage, and other aspects, as VIRVI was ready to launch April 3, began based only on the “perception”
well as maintenance and documen- three weeks after the start of the proj- of what features would be important to
tation requirements). At the product ect. The final product has 117 data ta- the product (based mainly on the CEO’s
launch three weeks later, the total im- bles, 506 data fields, 156 foreign keys, and the company’s experience in the
plemented function points were 1,365, 31 arrays, 115 formulas, 106 forms, 867 area, as well as a review of the literature
with a complexity level of 4,387. form fields, and 274 menus. and news). The team also had members
This illustrates the high volatility of with training and expertise in the health
requirements, regularly updated dur- Teams, Project Management, sector, and several contacts were made
ing the project execution following and Development Technology with specialists in health care. Later
the evolution of the pandemic and the How did Quidgest manage to get a fully Quidgest’s health coordinator joined
forecasted market opportunities. After functional product in only three weeks, the team, promoting the establishment
looking at national and international developed in a highly unstable environ- of a voluntary consultancy scheme. The
best practices and trends, Quidgest ment with requirements evolving daily result of all these voices was a daily evo-
decided to focus its solution on nurs- and with the described complexity? lution of the software requirements. In
ing and retirement homes (a prior- This section provides some insight. the end, the actual requirements came
ity in fighting the pandemic), national In the kick-off of the project and from a combination of the company’s
health authorities, hospitals, and during the first two weeks, the team experience, contact with specialists,
health laboratories. consisted of two full-time system ana- news from the media, scientific studies
The first fully functional prototype lysts/developers; one part-time (25%) and official reports on the pandemic.
of VIRVI was made available on March UX (user experience) designer; one full- Given the project’s characteristics,
22, and in the following week, it was time project manager; one part-time the company’s standard project-man-
presented in four countries, with three (50%) development-technology expert; agement approach was unfeasible in
formal demonstrations and two leads five part-time (25%) people from the this case since the market window of
generated. This garnered feedback marketing team; and four part-time opportunity was very tight, and the
from partners and led to the identifi- (25%) people from the sales team. After needs of different stakeholders had to
cation of additional required features. the first two weeks, the team changed be accommodated in the final analysis.
Furthermore, it confirmed that it to two part-time (50% system analysts/ Thus, it was necessary to take the agile
would be possible to respond quickly developers; one part-time (50%) project approach to project management to
to each client’s particular needs and manager; one part-time (25%) develop- the extreme because of the need for ac-
accommodate new requirements. ment-technology expert; one part-time cepting new requirements almost daily.
Some of the final features of the (50%) public-health consultant; four The Planner in Microsoft Teams was
used to support the process, focusing
Project milestones. on teams, tasks, and priorities (estab-
lished according to the milestones). A
Kanban board was created, which could
be edited by the whole team, with six
Business Functional
Case Prototype states: (1) tasks under analysis, (2) pend-
ing, (3) in progress, (4) executed, (5) for
March 12 April
March testing, and (6) finished. Regular team
Initial 13 March 3
Requirements 22 meetings were held to review the tasks
regarding priorities, obsolescence, and
Project Product clarification of requirements. Another
Kick-off Launch
striking aspect of the project was that it
was carried out entirely remotely (as of
March 16, the company started to work
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practice
remotely due to the pandemic lock- Conclusion
down restrictions). In this project, the challenge was to
Another ingredient crucial to the “deploy software faster than the coro-
success of the project was the low-code navirus spread.” In a project with such
technology adopted for software devel-
opment. Taking into account the enor- From the point of peculiar characteristics, several factors
can influence success, but some clearly
mous volatility of the requirements and
the need to provide fully functional solu-
market-opportunity stand out: top management support,
agility (in decision and management),
tions quickly, the challenge was how to awareness to the understanding and commitment of
achieve this without compromising the
quality of the software, the documenta-
availability of a fully the project team, and the technol-
ogy used. Conventional development
tion, or further required maintenance. functional software approaches and technologies would
In this context, the power and use-
fulness of low-code or extreme low-
product, the project simply not be able to meet the require-
ments promptly.
code technologies become even more took three weeks The project described here reflects
evident. These technologies currently
include the IBM Automation platform, to complete and the demands currently placed on com-
panies in terms of decision and action
Zoho Creator, Appian, Mendix, OutSys- involved several capacity. It combines market vision
state-of-the-art
tems, AgilePoint, Google App Maker, and rapid decision-making capacity
Nintex, TrackVia, Quickbase, Service- with action. The company identified an
Now, Salesforce App Cloud, Microsoft
Power Apps, Oracle Visual Builder, and
practices and tools. opportunity, defined a project, and de-
cided to move forward, structuring and
Oracle APEX (Application Express), organizing a team by adopting a differ-
just to name a few. The distinctive fea- ent approach to project management—
ture of these technologies is their abil- a streamlined agile approach—and
ity to create software applications with adopting a proactive marketing posture.
minimal hand-coding. For the project, Without technology that supported the
Quidgest used Genio, its proprietary rapid development and deployment of
platform. Genio is an extreme low- software, however, the project could
code (between low-code and no-code) not have been achieved in such a short
development technology. The develop- time—in a context of high instability
ment is pattern-oriented, and Genio and rapid evolution of requirements.
has code-generation features based on A study published by IBM in 2009,
modeling (model-driven engineering). “The Enterprise of the Future – Im-
The chosen technology allowed evo- plications for the CIO,” stated, “The
lutionary versions of the software to be enterprise of the future is hungry for
released on a daily basis. In this way, the change, innovative beyond customer
development process could be stream- imagination, globally integrated, dis-
lined. Even with the requirements ruptive by nature, genuine, not just
constantly evolving, the next day there generous.” These are, more than ever,
could already be a functional solution fundamental characteristics for to-
to support them. The advantages of low- day’s organizations, to which could be
code technology are also fundamental explicitly added, “supported by stable
to the maintenance of solutions. The as well as disruptive information tech-
benefits are, perhaps, even more notice- nology.” Low-code, extreme low-code,
able in this context, by making it possi- and no-code software development,
ble to support the continuous evolution supported by innovative technologies
of requirements without compromising such as artificial intelligence, cer-
the quality of the software artifacts (in- tainly have influence in this scenario
cluding documentation). and are expected to accelerate rapidly
Overall, the objectives defined for toward worldwide adoption as major
this project were met despite the high enablers of digital transformation.
risk caused by the instability of re-
quirements and application scenarios, João Varajão is a professor of information systems and
project management at the Department of Information
as well as the urgency of the solution. Systems of the University of Minho, Portugal. He is
In a short period of time, Quidgest’s also a researcher at the ALGORITMI Research Center.
Previously, he worked as an IT/IS consultant, project
project not only gave rise to several manager, information systems analyst, and software
developer for private companies and public institutions.
sales leads but also contributed to or-
ganizational learning and the visibility Copyright held by author/owner.
of the company. Publication rights licensed to ACM.
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