Since its founding, customers looked to SAS because of the robust SAS Platform. SAS’s own proprietary programming
language (SAS) has been employed by customers looking to take advantage of powerful algorithms, rendering reports and
dashboards custom to their unique business needs. In the 1990's, Dr. Jim Goodnight launched an effort involving the
development of unique offerings tailored for specific markets. Although SAS solutions have become more visible to
customers, significant expansion continues to occur within the Platform.
Staff members that were familiar with the methodology successfully used for Platform releases adopted that same method
for solution development. The culture with SAS played to their success since each team was free to use only those
segments of the process that pertained to its particular solution. This software development methodology used by the
Platform development teams is closely related to the waterfall development process6
, and scaled-back versions of it were
used by new solutions teams. In the mid-2000s, the volume of new solutions reached a tipping point. Although successful
for longer-term Platform releases, solutions customers were beginning to request features and releases at a faster pace.
SAS needed to adapt.
Limited success was observed with a couple of forays spawned from the Agile Manifesto7
, via Extreme programming and
RUP (Rational Unified Process8
). Internally, SAS created iterative development techniques but it wasn’t until January of
2007 where the Agile Scrum model was regarded as more complete approach to software development.
Coincidentally around that time, two different parts of the company were coming to the same conclusion. Bruce Kitto9
,
R&D Division Head for the Customer Intelligence product line, and Tim Arthur (author), R&D Director Project
Management. Bruce began working with an North Carolina State University professor, Dr. Laurie Williams10 for onsite
agile consulting. Tim’s early research led to a series of pilots, based on the pioneering work of Schwaber11 and Beedle’s