Sears Standardizes Development

1
Sears Standardizes Development

• MIS IN USE 6-2
• MGS 3040 03
• By William Brooks

2
Company Overview

• Sears, Roebuk and Company sells home merchandise,
  apparel, and auto products throughout the USA,
  Canada.
• Sears operates more then 2,300 retail outlets and
  sells over the web at Sear.com and Landsend.com.
• Sears Operates the largest home repair service in
  the United States. Making more then 14 Million
  service calls a year.

3
Sears Current System Development Methodologies

• Sears employs over 1,000 IT professionals who
  were using a variety of different system
  development methodologies, that includes SDLC
  (System Development Life Cycle), RAD (Rapid
  Application Development), and versions of UP
  (Unified Process)
• The variety of different development
  methodologies resulted in systems having
  inconsistent quality and timeliness.

4
Sears Challenges

• Sears central challenges was the use of multiple
  methodologies throughout IT. Associates were
  interpreting these methodologies in different
  ways.
• At the start of every project, the team had to
  create roles for the project, to decide which
  artifacts were going to be used.
• Without a consistent, repeatable methodology you
  have no way to pass on the process knowledge
  youre required.

5
Sears Solution

• Sears created a single, consistent
  enterprise-wide development process. This
  process is backed by software development tools
  licensed from IBM on a version of the unified
  process named RUP (Rational Unified Process)
  Methodology.
• These tools provide Sears developers the ability
  to manage requirements, development
  documentation, defects and testing etc.
• RUP was chosen as the standard because Sears
  teams had success using it on isolated projects.
  

6
Sears Final Results

• The have been encouraging. IT personnel are more
  effective because they learn only one development
  process. Improved management of development
  projects.
• Reduced the costs of system defects and failures
  by 20 percent.
• Sears IT department expects further cost savings
  as developers gain more experience with the tools
  and methods.

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REFERENCES

• Using MIS
• MIS in USE 6-2
• Page 179