Eighteen months ago Amnesty International began to replace traditional software development for the delivery of some core IT projects with the agile methodology.

The organisation is applying the peer programming techniques to work related to its public web site and other online applications such as document and customer relationship management (CRM).

“Because some of our projects had a very heavy and document-centric methodology, they were not delivering what people thought they were,” said Daryl Manning, director of IT at Amnesty.

“People working in software development recognise the failures of traditional delivery methods such as waterfall, so developers want to push the use of agile, particularly in web applications.”

Each project typically comprises a couple of developers and “user stories”, which involve workers who will be using or interacting with the system and an additional member of staff to act as a customer.

Even though agile software development environments are interaction-heavy, Manning says he does not encounter problems working with remote office-based staff.

“We deal with remote working just as we would with local teams. With our web projects, for example, we have daily scrum meetings involving developers based in the UK, US and India to co-ordinate activities and make sure we are on track,” he said.

“It was unusual for Amnesty to work with non-UK development teams at first, but anyone from an open source background who is used to doing digital work should be able to co-ordinate remote working and get things done that way.”

The main challenge faced by the organisation’s development teams during the migration to agile techniques was to understand how to prioritise tasks.

“As opposed to the traditional methods, agile gives us a clear view of what will need to be done first and what will come later, either via maintenance or in a second phase of the project,” said Manning.

“The formation of customer groups helped us to make hard choices and prioritise the delivery of what will provide us with the most business value.”

With the use of agile, Amnesty now delivers IT projects in about six weeks, as opposed to the several months it took using waterfall methods, with project teams, management and users “extremely happy with the results”.

The charity intends to completely switch to agile as a development methodology for its web projects, but will retain traditional methods for some large systems integration schemes.