Surviving the Economic Downturn

The national financial market turmoil that began in 2008 and continues to this day forced Iowa Student Loan and other student loan providers to make significant changes. This is a story about how Iowa Student Loan found innovative ways to continue to meet the need for private student loans and how the technical changes needed to accomplish this were implemented with relative ease. Three different periods of time are analyzed from 2007-2009 and conclusions are drawn to determine possible sources of our success. The main conclusions are: ensuring the business and development teams are speaking the same language, writing tests in a way that is easy to understand, having business-savvy developers and tech-savvy business analysts, paying down technical debt is a necessary and continual aspect of system design, the importance of prioritization, and making undefined requirements as configurable as possible.