Category: offshore

Economical trust

June 2, 2008 by Artem

Upfront planning

Last weeks I spent huge amount of time negotiating with the renovation company about the details of our upcoming bathroom renovation. You know, all this bargaining, market research and choosing between a multitude of option takes time. To make things even more complicated our house manager happened to be very peculiar about what he can allow to be changed - it triggered yet another round of negotiations and renegotiations even though we signed the contract already.

The biggest problem is that there is a decent element of uncertainty. Some technical decision can be made only after they start works and break the walls. Therefore we have to nail down plan B and plan C well in advance not to be offered a bill with the "additional costs" after the fact.

Distributed Development: How important is face-to-face interaction?

October 4, 2007 by Vaibhav

I work for a software company which has their development center in India. A large portion of the work that we take on has to do with product co-development. These clients are typically ISVs who have active product development teams. They usually partner with us to augment their team sizes to take advantage of the extended daily development cycle. So, for a client who is in the US, for example, our team here takes over from the US team when they come into the office and then hand over to the US team when they leave; this allows almost round-the-clock development.

In such a scenario, where two separate teams are working in close coordination with each other, the right kind interpersonal relationship within team members can really boost productivity and efficiency. So, how do you get a proper relationship going?

Distributed Agile Development - 1: Reinterpreting the manifesto.

September 28, 2007 by Vaibhav

This is Part 1 of an indefinite series of posts centered on the topic of distributed development and using agile methodologies in distributed teams.

Problem
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” The manifesto was put together in 2001; a long time ago by software industry standard. At that time, offshore development (the primary scenario for distributed development) was beginning to gather momentum, but most such development occurred using the traditional heavy-weight development methodologies.