Overstock.com, Coherence, and Agile development
Last week a story was published on Information Week about Overstock.com and its performance on Cyber Monday. According to the article, one of the factors of their success was the use of Coherence as a caching layer. As an Oracle/Tangosol employee, obviously it is great to see the software used successfully in this and so many other important deployments. However, there were other items that caught my eye:
“About a year ago, Byrne and Overstock.com CTO Sam Peterson decided to rehaul the Web site around the concept of “agile development,” where small teams of developers would work with each business unit to develop and improve functionality and roll out new releases as needed. “
and
“‘We had three developers on staff three or four years ago; now we have over 40 developers,” Byrne said in an interview. “We found it’s worth it to pay up for more expensive and more serious people.’”
This story demonstrates how the right mix of developers, process, and technology can produce the right results. Hopefully more businesses will come to understand this and therefore invest in their technical personnel.
