Accolade for Agile

Rich Freyberg, former CIO of Schwab Capital Markets:

For three months, near the end of the downsizing at Schwab (2003-2004), I led a small group of excellent programmers in the creation of a proof of concept for the Internal Brokers' Desktop - integrating myriad, technologically diverse applications. This POC was well received by both the business and technology communities, resulting in the funding for a multi-year, highly successful implemention of our vision.

Due to the lack of budget and time, we were forced to use what has come to be called an Agile Methodology. The project was guided by daily status meetings, high level narratives of functional use cases, and a daily prioritized backlog of work. In order to manage the complex interactions of .NET, Java and legacy systems, we relied on the team to self-organize and collaborate heavily rather than writing up-front design documents.

Our initial success led to the continued use of agile practices on the follow-on project.