Building for the long-term: How Aardling helped Isagri visualise and model their software systems

Isagri is an agriculture IT provider that builds innovative technologies for farmers and agribusiness companies. Since starting in 1983 in France, they’ve expanded worldwide, and offer solutions for crop and livestock management, weather, ERP, accounting & finance, and, of course, being French, vineyard management.

To stay innovative, some of their older software needed an overhaul. Isagri wanted to move the client accounting software to a set of SaaS services. Another project was to build a new module for the technical and economic management of livestock farms.

Lead by Maxime, Aardling supported the pilot team migrate their Fixed Assets module to a SaaS model. He conducted a series of workshops with Isagri’s domain experts and the development team, to do a deep Domain Discovery. Building on that, Maxime ran refinement workshops to define the contours of a loosely coupled architecture. For the livestock management module, he ran a series of business and technical workshops, involving Product Owners, business stakeholders, and engineers.

Rich use cases

Isagri has expanded into a vast range of business use cases for farms across the world so an approach that catered to this growing complexity was essential.

The pilot projects allowed Isagri to experience DDD in the real world and move beyond just theory. Applying rigorous software modelling was new for the teams and required them to step out of their comfort zone and adopt new ways of working.

Facilitation and Visualisation

One of the first major insights for Stéphanie’s team was this focus on visualisation.

The team became aware of the richness of the Fixed Assets module. They had clearly underestimated the scope of the problem. Maxime helped to prioritise the critical parts of the module and focus on the modelling and engineering. This broke the team out of analysis paralysis and helped to lower the cognitive load.

The mission was clear: modernise the technology, cover complex use cases with a deep understanding of the needs, build high quality software that is sustainable over the long term, and deliver innovations to customers faster.

It paid off:

Next steps

Stéphanie is already looking to use the multitude of tools and techniques on the next projects at Isagri.

Aardling’s work didn’t end there.