Shared AgilitySM is designed for teams building mission critical enterprise and rich internet applications under demanding deadlines who are dissatisfied with inaccurate estimates, budget overruns, launch delays, missed market opportunities, leadership deficiencies, communication problems or poor software quality. Shared Agility is an agile software development service and process that produces the highest quality software through project transparency and open collaboration between internal, external and distributed resources.

Project transparency is provided by sharing project vision, resources, information and accountability between the client and Quatro Consulting. Roles are often shared or passed between consultant and client to minimize cost, leverage existing domain experience, transfer knowledge and ensure client self sufficiency after the software is delivered. This enables stakeholders and team members to create software efficiently while meeting the evolving market needs.

Unlike the services of Big 5 consulting firms and offshore outsourcing firms, Shared Agility is optimized to lead the client through a process that opens communication to developers in local or distributed teams, exposes problems early, mitigates market uncertainty, provides transparency into the state of the project and empowers the client and development team.

The roles of Shared Agility include:

  • Facilitator - primary job is to empower all roles, remove road blocks, keep team focused on tasks and ensure the process is used correctly.
  • Product Owner - ensure the market needs are met by providing insight into the customer, market and end-user. This role is responsible for documenting requirements.
  • Team member - responsibilities include software development, testing and documentation.
  • Customer or End-user - validate benefits of software, if customer is not available then a customer proxy is used.
Shared Agility is a hybrid methodology based on the Scrum process but includes the use of artifacts from the Unified Process. Artifacts such as Use Cases, Class Diagrams, Deployment Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams are valuable tools that help developers create features and functionality that meet client expectations. Shared Agility provides flexibility at the inception of the project to allow the Facilitator to choose the artifacts that best match the environment in which the team and client will interact. For example, User Stories are best leveraged when developers will have complete access to the Product Owner. If the Product Owner has limited availability then requirements and expectations need to be fully codified in Use Cases. Shared Agility uses the iterative development cycles defined in Scrum as shown in the diagram below. Requirements are defined with the input of all roles and placed in a backlog. Then backlog items (Stories or Use Cases) are prioritized by the client. During a planning session, Team members and the Product Owner estimate scope for each backlog item and select items to be included in the development iteration or sprint. The sprint includes one to four weeks of development and acceptance testing. After completion of a sprint the product is demonstrated to ensure expectations are met. Feedback is considered and additional backlog tasks are created if necessary. The process repeats until the product is released. The iterative cycles ensure better requirements and estimations for subsequent iterations while identifying risks and problems early.




The Shared Agility process coupled with Quatro Consulting’s leadership and management is a proven recipe for success. Please see feedback from our customers here.