Stephan Schwab

Since moving to Panama City, Panama (the country in Central America where the Panama Canal is located, not the city in Florida), last year I’ve been involved in the project of a local client and started my own in March. Both experiences have given me a lot of insight what you can do in Panama. I may even do an educated guess about the possibilities in other Latin American countries based on my recent experience and what I know from previous travels throughout the region and conversations with people from those other countries (mainly Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Colombia).

Further I’ve been participating as a speaker and attendee local events like the Geek Fest Panama or UXcamp.

While I made my experience with Panamanian developers as part of my work for a local client and came to the conclusion that there are indeed smart brains in Panama capable of developing software using current Java technologies, I can now talk about how well an agile process works by telling the story of the development of our product Savila. There is a lot of talk going on about how to outsource development, whether outsourcing works or creates more hassle than it’s worth or how to do “agile” with a distributed team or one that is in another country or culture.

So my question is whether companies or user groups would be interested in hearing more about these topics. Please feel free to leave a comment or email me.

After the first day using Savila I can say that it does make a difference whether you are just developing a product for someone else or you are using it yourself. Within a few hours of real use we could find a larger number of bugs or other inconsistencies that we simply were not aware of before. You can write unit tests, integration tests, even use automated UI testing with tools like Selenium, but that way you only can verify expected behavior. You can’t find out whether something really makes sense. For that you have to use the product yourself trying to get real work done. Running it day in and out within your development environment is not the same.

In the case of our upcoming product Savila, we can be the developers and stakeholders at the same time. Developing custom software for clients makes it a bit more difficult. The developers cannot easily slip into the role of a stakeholder. The only way for “using” it is to provide the stakeholders new iterations of the product in short time. But that’s not so easy as it sounds and requires a customer who embraces agile thinking himself.

The day when you start using the product you are working on is a special day in a developer’s life. At my company Caimito we’ve started today to use the product we are building: our dogfood is called Savila 0.2.