Getronics Business Application Services (BAS), the applications services division of the European IT services company, has been using agile development methods in the form of Borland’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform for more than two years.

Like many business units in these times of economic instability, BAS is in the process of being acquired by a third party – in this case, consultancy firm Capgemini, in a deal worth £198m. But it is the unit’s advanced approach to using ALM that made the deal workable, says Mike Doyle, BAS’s programme director of process maturity.

“What we are doing fits in very well with what Capgemini is doing. A major selling point was that we already have this ALM programme running, and by improving our quality and efficiency we are a lot better placed than in the past to offshore software development more easily,” says Doyle.

Getronics already employs 200 people in Bangalore and plans to increase that number in the near future.

“As we better define the development process and automate the tooling, it is easier for us to get the stuff over to Bangalore and back. We are in the business of making money like every other company, and it also helps us lower our price,” says Doyle.

BAS currently has about 550 people in total using Borland’s ALM software but plans to expand that to more than 1,000 in the near future.

Doyle estimates that BAS’s software development process became 15 per cent more efficient after its programmers started using defined development processes, supported by the use of appropriate tools.

“Programmers are more sure of themselves, make fewer mistakes and spend less time in meetings figuring out how to do the whole project,” says Doyle.

Another advantage of using ALM is that it lets programmers be more flexible about the projects they work on.

“The division used to be split into a number of groups, with each one typically focusing on a specific application development technology such as .Net, Java and so on,” says Doyle. “That was another goal we had in bringing in Borland – to make those practitioners able to work more flexibly across the business units, and that required a single application development process and the tooling to support it so we could move guys between projects when we wanted.”