So Far So Good

by Hassan Syed

ISIS Assistant Director

The six-week pilot project with A-1 Technology Inc. is just past its midpoint, and so far, so good. The purpose of the pilot is to test the new methodology devised by ISIS for finishing ZIMS and to test the potential working relationship between ISIS and the new vendor.

Our team is creating the technical frameworks for ZIMS and we are teaching A-1’s team a specific way of writing the code for ZIMS pages that will guarantee a higher-than-standard quality and make ZIMS far easier to maintain and upgrade over the long term.

It’s too early to give you a definite statement that ZIMS will re-launch with A-1 as its new vendor. We’ll keep you up to date!

Of Waterfalls, Wicked Problems and the Scrum Master

by Jaime Meyer

ISIS Communications Specialist

Software development is incredibly difficult to describe to non-developers. It has its own secret language, called, appropriately, “code.” If you enjoy exploring secret language, read on:

The Waterfall Model of software development is the “traditional” approach. In very general terms, waterfall development pre-plans the fixed sequence of events for the development of the entire application. Once the sequence of events is set in motion, the entire project moves along, cascading like a waterfall, unstoppable and unchangeable. The Waterfall model lends itself well to traditional top-down managerial control. But Waterfall can fail to account for wicked problems: subtle, odd, unexpected problems full of internal contradictions that cannot be planned for. Software development is the playground of wicked problems, and in the waterfall method, the client does not see working software until far downstream, which raises the risk that wicked problems can become deadly. (Thanks for some of this text to tucows.com)

ZIMS is now using a methodology that arose about ten years ago as a response to the Waterfall method. It’s called Agile Methodology. Where Waterfall tries to avoid wicked problems through copious pre-planning, Agile acknowledges that wicked problems are going jump into your day no matter how well you plan. Agile is based on close collaboration between the developers and the clients with a focus on flexibility to make quick changes or to re-prioritize. The specific Agile method ISIS is using is called Scrum, which has a vague connection to the term in rugby for packs of players binding together face to face to make a play. In the rugby scrum, a small number of players pack in tightly, moving, pushing, repositioning, and adjusting moment to moment until the ball pops out and the game goes to the next phase. Scrum is intended to be fast-paced and focused on producing tangible results quickly in short bursts. Rather than releasing the whole software program all at once like a waterfall pouring over the edge, Scrum releases pieces, or iterations, of working software and adds in more working pieces over time. Each Scrum-developed piece works, and has had the full input and approval of the client because it meets very specific business needs. This is why ZIMS will be released in several stages. (Thanks for some of this text to “Adaptive Project Management Using Scrum” by Craig Murphy.)

One of the basic elements of Scrum is the daily scrum meeting; in our case held at 8 AM Central Time (6:30 PM New Delhi time). Like all aspects of Scrum, these meetings are tightly time-boxed. Daily Scrum meetings are allowed to last only 15 minutes and they focus on each participant answering in as few words as possible three critical questions:

What did I do yesterday?
What am I doing today?
What are the obstacles in my way today?

The purpose of Scrum meetings is to form a close-knit, fast-working team with tight focus on the common goal. The Scrum meeting is a symbol of the intense, focused process ISIS is now using. It takes a strong coach and mentor to make this process work – the person we call the Scrum Master – and that person for us is our new ZIMS Project Manager, Alvin Smith. Al is located at the ISIS office in Minnesota and his job is to make sure that in this quick-moving, shifting, flexible, collaborative Agile environment, everything moves steadily forward, stays focused, and no one gets lost. Welcome Al!

ISIS technical team creating “coolest parts” of ZIMS

By Nate Flesness
ISIS executive Director

The new methodology we plan to use for completing ZIMS is called agile development.

With this process, ISIS will have direct, instant oversight every day of all work being done on ZIMS. With that responsibility also comes the fun: the expanded ISIS technical team is itself creating some of the new, “coolest parts” of ZIMS. Our plan is for the new vendor to write the more generic technical parts of ZIMS (such as improving the overall user interface, or user-friendliness), with ISIS requiring higher quality code than is written for most software.

ISIS has assembled a top-notch development team. Even before we have selected a new vendor (see ZIMSblog post below), our internal team has already done significant work on ZIMS. One example is simplifying the database. It’s impossible to describe this briefly, but basically, the way the database was working was far too complex. Our team and consultants looked at it and after evaluation, we cut its complexity in half.

Below is another example. It’s a draft version – a “proof of concept” – of a more powerful taxon tree. It shows taxonomy, but also lists all the animals now in the institution, by each taxon. Because it is built with cutting edge technology, it produces this report in a few seconds. (Please remember that this screen exists in this form only to test the underlying technical architecture—this is not how the finished ZIMS will actually look. )


All of this makes clear why it is critical to have ZIMS created by people who really understand what zoos and aquariums do and what they need. We will finish ZIMS with those people (some from the community of Subject Matter Experts and some from the ISIS staff) sitting next to the programmers. This approach is already making a huge difference in our development process.

Hello From India!

By Doug Verduzco
ZIMS Chief Architect

We have completed the first week of the six-week pilot project with A-1 Technologies. The purpose of this pilot is to test the working relationship and the new methodology ISIS has proposed for completing ZIMS. We’ve gotten used to saying that ISIS is a unique client and ZIMS is a highly unusual and complex application, but I'm telling you, whenever we begin talking about what ZIMS needs to do and what ISIS has done for 34 years, people’s eyes grow big - they’ve never seen anything like this!

This week was all about familiarizing the A-1 team with ISIS, the zoological world, the ZIMS project, and the technical architecture that the ISIS team has envisioned for ZIMS. Eight ISIS team members delivered the orientation, including Nate, Hassan, Elisabeth, Wenlei, Craig, Rich, Kim, and myself, and this took all week. We hit them with a lot of information. They asked a lot of great questions, and the week went very well.

Over the next several weeks, as we get down to creating some ZIMS screens, we will determine if A-1 is a good fit to complete the ZIMS project over the long haul. We all hope this will work, but ISIS is being careful to make sure that this relationship works for our needs.

It’s been a hectic week, and getting eight people from Minnesota to Gurgaon involves a great deal of logistics. This is part of what we are testing too with this six-week pilot, because part of what makes this project unique is that ISIS will have its own people present throughout this process. Those ISIS people may be developers from the ISIS office or Subject Matter Experts from our community. So over the next year, ISIS will be racking up a lot of frequent flier miles for a lot of people!

So far, it’s not been without its headaches (or stomach-aches!) but for ZIMS to be delivered with the exceptional quality and complexity that our community needs, this is how the job needs to be done.

(We have been able to have a little fun:)