Meet the team
Fusion Development is meant to empower both your development and business teams to create better software, faster. Your journey through Fusion Development begins with an introduction to our fictitious team members, who are discovering they need to improve their processes to lower the friction of doing business.
VanArsdel, Ltd. Heating and Air Conditioning, or VanArsdel for short, is a full service heating and air conditioning contractor. The core of VanArsdel's business involves sending field technicians to customers’ houses to install and repair all brands of heating and air conditioning equipment.
VanArsdel's business has grown exponentially over the past year. Along with that growth has come friction in scaling core business applications.
The software development team at VanArsdel is stretched thin and is working as fast as possible on a huge backlog. Meanwhile the business team relies on manual and paper-intensive work processes that do not scale, and this is causing undue stress and inefficiencies on the entire company.
You have been selected to work with some of VanArsdel's top employees as they brainstorm a way to develop software faster and empower the whole company in the process.
You will help them create a Fusion Development team.
Team members
Here are your team members:
The kickoff meeting
The first agenda item of the Fusion Development kickoff meeting is to choose which business problem to address.
Caleb, VanArsdel's lead field technician, says he has a problem that's perfect for this team to solve.
It involves manual data entry with paper and pencil, phone calls, legacy software systems, and lots of lost time traveling between a customer's house and the central warehouse.
Maria, who oversees inventory management, smiles and says "I know what you're talking about Caleb, it's our Field Inventory Management System, isn't it?"
VanArsdel's lead developer, Kiana, shakes her head and apologizes "I feel bad, my team just doesn't have the time to modernize what's there or write the new portions for it."
"Sounds like a great place to start", Preeti observes, "but what is the Field Inventory Management System and how are we going to fix it?"
"I've been reading about this thing called Tech Intensity", Malik answers, "that I think helps explain how we'll work together. Once we understand that, then we can move on to solving the Field Inventory Management problem."
The team's attention turned to Malik as he walked toward the whiteboard.