The company

Founded in April 2001, Agriness is focused on developing solutions for information management on pig breeding. The company's has in its business essence the objective of helping to professionalize the producer, enabling him in the handling of managing tools.

Agriness was the first company to suggest a computerized managing model that uses as its tool the best and most complete software in the market and also the first to put a team of information technology that speaks the same language as the producer and understands the process of the swine production. Because of its posture, it has taken the Brazilian leadership in the software management of pig farms market, managing over 620,000 matrices operating all over the national territory, with over 1200 clients settled. It also exports technology to other countries such as France, Poland, Cabo Verde, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia.

	Cristina Bittencourt, Technology Director

The search

Agriness development area has always had an exact and fast service as its differential. As a result of its continuous growth, Agriness became conscious of the need of a methodology change to acquire more control of the projects that it was running.

We tried out a model inspired on RUP, but we found it too bureaucratic. When we got to know Scrum we realized that it went on well with what Agriness expected from a methodology.

Reports Cristina Bittencourt, Technology Director and participant of the Mentoring Project.

The change

Agriness decided to take this chance and hired OnCast's Mentoring to guide through the process. Samuel, from OnCast, took charge of the challenge and noticed straight away that there was room to improve project valuation, reduce maintenance costs and promote team work.

The Mentoring started with agile acculturation training, presenting Lean and Scrum concepts. After that, the application of these concepts on a real project began.

"We had some resistance at first. It was hard to set in. But, as soon as the staff saw the project running, everybody got committed to it", reports Vinícius Rodrigues Nunes, the most recent Scrum Master at Agriness.

According to Vinícios, “the attendance given by OnCast during the intensive Mentoring period was very important. Stopped the team from letting some techniques loose and escaping the methodology". After a 2-month-process with frequent meetings for the Agriness project progress Samuel Crescêncio (OnCast consultant) continued attending the team on some planning interactions and daily meetings.

Higher production and lower maintenance cost

Visibility increased production naturally, Cristina.

In a few months the mentoring results were very significant to Agriness. Its main goals where achieved and Agriness keeps on growing through the continuous improvement. The testing process evolved and was distributed on the course of the development cycle. The amount of Bugs at the backlog reached zero at some moments. Cristina also reports ". This year, we were able to measure the quantity of collateral effects. We noticed that from January to May 2009, the incidence of bugs had a significant reduction".

Visibility and management

The interaction process, the burndown and planning meetings, allowed us a priceless visibility, according to Vinícios.

With the use of Scrum the team achieved a greater visibility of the project as a whole, it generated a friendly environment along the team, as well as the increase on the production, the roles were better established and there is a higher prognosis of goals and timelines. The obstacles were expressed by the team and quickly tackled.

Scrum helped to manage the way we respond to the market, adds Cristina.

The values were transmitted to other areas

Nowadays Agriness select people with the profile of taking in different roles in the solution development instead of focusing on specialists. Cristina believes this was remarkable and helped to settle a collaboration spirit making everyone feel responsible for the success of the project as a whole.

Scrum showed us some problems. It generated a great internal discussion. We even looked into our hiring proceedings, concludes Cristina.

Improvement continues

We are never short of plans. Presently Agriness is facing new challenges, it has to create new products and carry on evolving the existent ones. Therefore, it has adopted their own solutions, like a new type of kanban, different colors on the dashboard and they are also using abetterteam.org to attend their evolution.

The best of all is the consciousness that has settled at Agriness. The development team knows its role in the company's strategy and the managers are confident in the projects positions and goals. A friendly and cooperative spirit!