12.3. An Initial Plan After discussions, it was agreed that using Fit to put customer tests in place would be a good step forward. This was a part of a larger process of introducing agile development techniques into RPS. One of the more skeptical people had a good question: "How do we know if we've made an improvement?" This seemed a good time to consider the business goals. Here are some that were decided on, although no statistics have been kept for some of these goals. Have all customers eager to move to the latest version of RentEz, so as to cut the cost of maintaining several versions. Reduce the time taken to add new features, to help sales and to reduce costs. Improve the estimates of the effort to add possible new features. Improve current customer satisfaction. Reduce the number of complaints of problems with RentEz.
These goals turn into several more detailed goals for software development. Reduce the number of bugs reported from the field. Reduce the number of bugs yet to be fixed. Reduce the time spent in finding the cause of bugs and fixing them. Reduce the effort spent on developing extensions that require drastic rework. Reduce the overtime and the stress of last-minutes rushes to get software out, to avoid missing faults that are then picked up by the users. Focus the effort on the changes that help sell the product and are most beneficial to clients.
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