Development Approach....................................................................................................

2
RAD Methodology............................................................................................................ 3
Agile Methodology........................................................................................................... 4
Waterfall Methodology..................................................................................................... 6

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

Page 1

Development Approach
Sapient|Approach is a distributed agile delivery methodology that is used on all client
engagements that can be tailored to each client and their standard processes. Sapient|
Approach consists of processes, standards, best practices and supporting tools that cover all
aspects of software engineering and program management. Sapient|Approach is the product
of over 14 years of experience in delivering creative solutions to complex business problems
on-time and on-budget at success rates nearly three times the industry average. Sapient|
Approach is used consistently across all of our offices and development centers globally,
allowing us to create highly effective, onshore/offshore project teams capable of delivering
measurable value.
Figure shows the track record of (Sapient|Approach) relative to industry benchmarks.
Figure 1 - Track Record of the Sapient|Approach Methodology
Industry-wide*
On time,
on budget

Challenged

Cancelled

34%

On time, on budget

Sapient**

83%

On time,
on budget

51%

15%

17%

Challenged

Challenged (Industry-wide)

Challenged (Sapient)

Average cost overrun is 43%

No cost overruns to client

per fixed-price, fixed-time
agreement

Average time overrun

is 82%

Average time overrun

is less than 20%

Projects delivered with 42%

of the planned capability.

All delivered with 100%

planned capability

Projects cancelled midstream

<1% of Sapients
engagements

*Source: The Chaos Chronicles, The Standish Group, 2004

**Based on over 2,700 projects completed from 19972004

Sapient|Approach focuses specifically on achieving business value for our clients by:

Defining measurable business results for every project.

Leveraging user-centric techniques to understand and prioritize requirements.

Eliminating waste and increasing developer productivity through effective requirements

management and lean development techniques.

Accelerating client return-on-investment through continuous, incremental and iterative

delivery of high-quality working systems.

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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RAD Methodology
Sapient has a strong track record in successful project delivery using Rapid Application
Development (RAD) techniques to incrementally deliver systems in short timeframes while
maintaining a continuous focus on quality and cost. Methodologies such as Rational Unified
Process (RUP), Extreme Programming (XP) and Dynamic Systems Development
Methodology (DSDM) have been successfully utilized by our teams and have been formally
integrated into Sapient|Approach.
We have found these techniques to be critically important in:

Responding to emergent and frequently changing requirements.

Testing and validating key architectural concepts early in the project lifecycle in order to reduce
risk.

Demonstrating measurable, incremental progress to legitimatise continued project funding.

RAD methodologies also place significant emphasis on rapid business analysis to produce
solutions aligned to business needs. Driving IT and business stakeholder alignment has
been at the heart of Sapient|Approach since our foundation. Listening to the customer is
extraordinarily important, but understanding what questions to ask in order to elicit a
response that clarifies needs is, from a service provider perspective, equally if not more
important. Sapient has chosen to be in the business of enabling our clients success, which
compels us to guide and facilitate conversations in a manner that leads clients to clarity and
consensus, building momentum and catalyzing action around strategic and tactical solutions
to critical business problems.
Our unique RAD-influenced methodology differs from traditional Waterfall development in the
following ways:

Strong emphasis on rapid prototyping throughout the project life, but especially during the earliest
stages of development, as a means to prove concepts and establish project legitimacy.

Continuous demonstration of measurable progress in the form of working software.

A distinctly different view of what constitutes quality, with a focus on delivering measurable
business results over closely following a detailed, written specification.

A large US-based energy company sought out Sapients experience in the commodities
trading and risk management space. A collaborative team of Sapient people worked
alongside clients in a fast-paced, facilitated workshop format to identify the features of a
system that would effectively enable the business to predict its P/L. This was uncharted
territory for the client and given the unique characteristics of the clients business, it was
similarly an unprecedented project for Sapient despite our depth of knowledge in the
industry. Thus, due to the experimental and emergent nature of the projects requirements,
we adopted a RAD approach, enabling the client to prototype new concepts (e.g. prediction
algorithms) and see the results before committing to a final solution. Leveraging Sapient|
Approach in this fashion, the team delivered new increments of working functionality to
business users every two weeks. Engaging with the client continuously to elicit feedback has
driven innovation, eliminated wasteful speculative requirements and has enabled the client
to better manage their energy trading business.

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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Agile Methodology
The marriage of agile methods with globally distributed delivery offers a unique value
proposition that aligns business and IT priorities and enables responsiveness to changing
requirements within a cost-effective and highly scalable operating model. Sapient|Approach
is a distributed-agile delivery methodology that draws upon best-of-breed practices found in
such methods as Extreme Programming (XP), Lean Development, Scrum, DSDM and Agile
Modeling. Sapient|Approach has even gone beyond the agile domain, integrating key risk
management and productivity concepts from Theory of Constraints Project Management
Our long-time partnership with the U.S. Armed Forces offers numerous examples of how
Sapient has leveraged agile practices to accelerate business value. For instance, in the case
of the U.S. Marines Corp, we teamed with Pennsylvania State University's renowned Centre
for Logistics Research to deliver an Integrated Logistics Capability (ILC) engagement
designed to improve the effectiveness of the Marines' supply-chain operations. Using agile
methods of Sapient|Approach, we successfully delivered the following business results in a
twelve week timeframe:

A leaner support structure that will free up 1,800 Marines from logistics duties and make them
available for other purposes

Faster deployment capability resulting from a 20 percent to 70 percent reduction in the tonnage
it needs to ship

A one-time reduction in inventory of 45 percent to 61 percent

Inventory cost savings of $125 million to $180 million every year

A 35 percent to 50 percent reduction in order-cycle time for products and services

Similarly, in our partnership with Hilton International, with the 400-strong hotels division of
UK-based Hilton Group plc, we utilized agile, concurrent development and staged release
techniques to enable the business to offer online, local language services in its largest
source markets. Developing its online sales channel and generating greater income through
the Internet were key business objectives for Hilton International, who partnered with Sapient
because of our ability to rapidly design and deploy systems, on time and on budget. Over the
course of this 50-plus week programme, we delivered a total of four major market-facing
product releases, extending Hilton Internationals business in the UK, Germany, Japan,
Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Hilton International has since continued its
relationship with Sapient, awarding us the opportunity to manage its e-commerce
applications.
Key distinctions between the agile, iterative Sapient|Approach model and traditional
Waterfall development include:

Regular, continuous customer interaction.

Acknowledging the decreasing precision of plans.

Evolutionary requirements analysis and design.

Test-first development and continuous integration.

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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Source

Core Discipline

Key Business Benefit

Requirements

Get the right requirements

RUP
Fusion
Agile Modelling

Analysis & Design

XP
Lean

Eliminate waste
Development

Scrum
DSDM

Programme Management

Accelerate ROI

ToC PM

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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Waterfall Methodology
Sapient has had considerable success in delivering for our clients using a Waterfall delivery
framework in a distributed, onshore/offshore model. Since our first distributed development
project in 1995, we have built our organizations capabilities around this engagement model
as a means of leveraging exceptional talent, reducing development cycle times and
managing costs. However, due to the communications overhead associated with distributed
development, robust infrastructure is essential to maximizing the effectiveness of this model.
Sapient|Approach has evolved throughout Sapients history and has been tailored to meet
the varied needs of different customers and project constraints. The best practices
encapsulated in Sapient|Approach, such as user-centric requirements gathering, test-driven
development, continuous integration have all been applied in a Waterfall delivery context on
numerous projects; however, Sapient believes that RAD and agile techniques, as opposed to
the Waterfall model, pose a more compelling value proposition for the modern, IT-enabled
enterprise.
Figure 2 - Waterfall Development Model
Requirements
Analysis

Design
Specification

Implementation

Integration

Maintenance

The waterfall model suffers from a number of critical limitations:

The presumption that solution requirements are well-understood at the time of

project inception and will not change materially throughout the course of the projects
life is often untrue; this, coupled with the serial nature of the Waterfall approach can
result in wasteful paper-based design and speculative development that do not
lead directly to a working, deployable product.

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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Working software is often not available until late in the project, deferring testing and user
feedback to a point where introducing change is often unacceptably costly; the high cost
of change, therefore, forces the customer to speculate up-front about what features are
needed and scope is locked down as soon as possible. As changes in scope are
viewed as costly, both the customer and the development partner are deterred from
embracing change. Thus, innovation for the customers competitive advantage is
unnecessarily curtailed.

As integration happens near the end of the serial development process, it is not possible
to deploy the system until all solution components have been built. In a business
environment wherein demonstrating measurable progress is essential to continued
project support, creative means of quantifying progress, such as Earned Value, are
frequently used to satisfy this need; however, such techniques tend to gloss over the fact
that there is no deployable product, and thus, no ROI opportunity until the projects end.

Cost of change

Figure - Cost-of-change curve historically associated with Waterfall-based development

Requirements
Analysis

Design

Code

Test

Go-live

Lifecycle Stage

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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Cost of change

Flattened cost-of-change curve made possible through Agile methods

Release 1

Release 2

Release 3

Release 4

Release 5

Time

Agile methods such as Sapient|Approach, by contrast, organize the project schedule into
iterations, each of which produces a working end-to-end vertical solution slice. By
incrementally developing and integrating the solution in this manner, agile methods directly
address the limitations of the waterfall model by:

Eschewing wasteful up-front requirements speculation and paper-based design.

Providing regular opportunities throughout the project life for the customer to offer
feedback introduce new requirements and re-prioritise development on the basis of
business value and technical complexity.

Leveraging test-driven development, continuous integration and test automation to

accelerate cycle times, eliminate defects early and minimise and reduce the cost of
rework.

Promoting the principles of simple design as a means of improving the maintainability of code,
decreasing the cost of changes incorporated late in development and lowering the customers
total cost of ownership.

Prepared by Sapient
June 19, 2012

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