"Ready-to-roll" boxcar development - a flexible, quality-weighted process

Abstract

In January of 1996, Intuit's QuickBooks team was faced with an aging code-base using a custom Mac/Win GUI toolkit, a large and rapidly growing customer base, and a rapidly growing and product-inexperienced engineering team. To increase the product's quality and feature predictability while retaining its ship date rigidity, we created "ready-to-roll" boxcar development. The process enabled the defining of each new feature, enhancement, or engineering rearchitecture as a set of boxcars on the product train. A "coupled" boxcar was rapidly brought to a supportable level of quality, or "decoupled" for reevaluation and reengineering. Frontloading the highest priority boxcars increased predictability of the product train's contents, while the process allowed for greater flexibility with respect to overall content. "Ready-to-roll" boxcar development kept the product within 2-3 weeks of being supportable and shippable. The process focused on individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change. Better yet, it worked.