Guidewire ClaimCenter Development with Agile, Scrum, Maven and SOA

One of the project that I worked on was an implementation of Guidewire Software's ClaimCenter. The project went live successfully thanks to the great collaboration of the entire team. The team was small but the spirit of collaboration was great. While there will always be some pain in any development project, the project which consist of replacing a legacy insurance claim system went relatively very well.

The project implemented Agile Software Development Methodology which help in getting the business logic implemented and adjusted for change quickly when necessary. The usage of monthly sprints helped in establishing delivery priorities and help stakeholders to quickly confirm if they are getting what they expected or not. This type of quick feedbacks are crucial for the success of the project as changes can be made early enough before it gets to costly to change.

The project also uses morning Scrums. While these can be informative for stakeholder representatives, personally it can get annoying when there are those who will start to ramble about some nonsense no-one else care about, or when it get long and we get stuck in a hot, stuffy and claustrophobic room.

I would think integrating services such as Twitter to broadcast updates would be more "high tech" and efficient if the company didn't block it. I can understand that there will be those who may abuse such availability, but for the rest of us who can use such technology responsibly, it's a loss of technological opportunity. The uses of technology such as Twitter can be extended for example as: build notification, support request and transmission failure notification. While security may be an issue there are ways to code message in such a way that security need not be breach. After all, not all broadcasts have to be made public.

Our usage of "SOA wannabe" technology - a partial implementation of a full blown SOA concept help in bridging our clunker-of-technology to work with the brand-spanking-new ClaimCenter implementation. The old and the new can be made to play well with each other. The complexity of interaction between so many different subsystem can be abstracted and different technology were made to integrate seamlessly. It's just a beautiful orchestration of technologies.

One base technology which initially hit a resistance, mainly for a lack of support from Guidewire Software is using Maven2 as a build tool as oppose to Ant. The project in a some sense was "dragged kicking and screaming" to use Maven. There was initial unhappiness and resistance for the change. Now, however, after live deployment, it is proven that using Maven simplifies the process of maintaining the build process and take most of the tedious hardwork off the process. The declarative approach of Maven - compared to the task-centric approach of Ant - significantly reduces the need of maintaining build files. Just another proof that having a bit of forward vision does not always pay off initially but might pay well later on.