"Ready-to-roll" boxcar development - a flexible, quality-weighted process

In January of 1996, Intuit\´s QuickBooks team was faced with an aging code-base using a custom Mac/Win GUI toolkit, a large and rapidly growing customer base, and a rapidly growing and product-inexperienced engineering team. To increase the product\´s quality and feature predictability while retaining its ship date rigidity, we created "ready-to-roll" boxcar development. The process enabled the defining of each new feature, enhancement, or engineering rearchitecture as a set of boxcars on the product train. A "coupled" boxcar was rapidly brought to a supportable level of quality, or "decoupled" for reevaluation and reengineering. Frontloading the highest priority boxcars increased predictability of the product train\´s contents, while the process allowed for greater flexibility with respect to overall content. "Ready-to-roll" boxcar development kept the product within 2-3 weeks of being supportable and shippable. The process focused on individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change. Better yet, it worked.