The end of demoware

Damon Poole points out a benefit of agile development that I hadn’t given much thought to:

…the reason I enjoy Agile development is because it made my job more fun. Today, thanks to Agile development, I interact with customers more than ever before. As a product owner, I do more demos and am able to provide new features that hit closer to the mark faster and more frequently than ever before. This in turn means more oohs and ahs from customers which is more fun for me and more profitable for the business.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ll be working the Borland booth at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto next week. We will be showing the integration between SilkCentral Test Manager and a popular open source testing tool. (The marketing people won’t let me say be more specific here; come by the booth at the conference to find out more!) The guy who’s preparing the booth demos and materials for the integration just sent me the following email:

I’ve been working . . . on our Agile Test Strategy for SCTM [SilkCentral Test Manager] and how it relates to our other solutions. I’m putting together the PowerPoint for the ‘demo loop’ in the booth based on the information I was able to gather over the last couple of days.
Also, I have a VMWare image of the integration . . . I plan to have screen shots of the demo . . . but have the VMWare image available for those who’d like more info on the integration.

The integration that we will show at the conference was developed very recently but will be released later. Due to our internal use of agile, we have this functionality working now, and we will be able to demo it. Without agile, I would have been stuck in the booth with the slide deck and other published materials only.