WebSphere Portal 6.1: An Agile Development Approach

Abstract

IBM’s Portal technology continues to evolve as a powerful infrastructure for integrating the IT landscape, by presenting it as a consolidated view to the user community. The new capabilities of WebSphere Portal 6.1 are the outcome of a world-wide development team, which focused on this release for the past 2 years. During that time major architectural enhancements have been introduced and a significant amount of code was written. In this article the authors will describe how developers and testers have adopted agile principles to collaborate across the globe. In detail, aspects like an iterative approach, test driven development, budget based prioritization and cross-organization teaming will be discussed. The authors will also cover how “tiger teams” interact with customers by making early code drops available and responding to feedback.