Tag: agilealliance

Achieving Agility in Globally Distributed Software Development
In today's business climate there exists an ever-increasing demand to achieve more from less. More return from less investment, faster time to market from shrinking resources, higher quality from collapsing timelines. The impact of these pressures on the software development industry has meant that organizations have had to look for new avenues such as offshore development to reduce costs yet still satisfy these increasing demands. Simply incorporating an offshore development strategy to realize lower costs is not a solution. Leveraging the lower cost and resource scalability that an offshore development strategy provides must also include the facilities to enable that capability to produce better results faster.

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“Agile” Versus “agile” Development

There's no question that "agile" is the buzzword of the times for software developers, ISVs, consultants, and businesses, in general. As with most buzzwords, the term is often over-used and mis-used, especially by those trying to portray their products or services in a new light. In the world of software development, the term "agile" is applied to a wide variety of processes, techniques, tools, projects, and phases of the development life cycle. It's important, therefore, to set out some basic definitions and context for the use of the term "agile," especially as it will be used in articles throughout this journal.

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Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale (Part I of II )

The benefits of agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements and higher application quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. Agile practices, however, have been defined and recommended primarily to small team environments where co-location, ready access to interactive customers and small team size are the defining rule.  Are the benefits of agility to be denied to those larger software enterprises who don't share these simple paradigms? Or can the industry learn from these practices and apply some of the core principles to large scale development of applications that require 100, 200 or even 1,000 distributed team members to achieve?

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