Tag: communication

Supercharge Your Application Development Open Source Strategy with an Architecture-centric Approach
Today's software developer, like never before, is blessed with a plethora of sophisticated open source tools and technologies to aid his craft in producing market-worthy applications.  Leveraging these resources together with the developer's business domain knowledge and agile best practices can quickly yield some truly amazing results  To sustain these successes, an application developer must apply an architectural-centric approach in order to realize longevity, flexibility and independence in his application.

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FEATURED BOOK: Practical Development Environments - by Matthew B. Doar

Okay - so you're "doing the ‘Agile' thing" with your software development. How about your development environment? Are all the tools in your development environment truly practical?

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Stretched to the Limit

If the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication?

When serendipity taps you on the shoulder I've found it best not to ignore the intrusion. I recently got back from an intense trip to India, speaking at several seminars and to a number of our leading customers. On my return I picked up "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and this book provided me with a deeper perspective on what I had just learned, face-to-face, with the same groups of people I had just met in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. And here we are in the second edition of Agile Journal talking about Offshore Agile Development.

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Tackling Offshore Agile Development
As an analyst, I have spoken with hundreds of software developers and managers struggling to improve their delivery capabilities. Many are turning to Agile processes as a means to deliver high quality solutions and at the same time improve time to benefits. And, at the same time, these teams need to work with ever-shrinking budgets. Of all the questions they asked about Agile development in 2005, the most common - and the toughest - was: "Can we take advantage of offshore resources and still use Agile processes?"

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FEATURED BOOK: Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders

Numerous Agile methods and principles emphasize the value of collaboration and self-organization. Most books on the subject of Agile development discuss principles and practices related to planning and development practices. Yet few Agile books delve deeply into the How To's of collaboration, facilitation and project leadership. Collaboration Explained, by Jean Tabaka, does exactly this: it takes the essential skills, methods, and proven practices of successful team leaders and group facilitators, and explains them in detail while also applying them directly to the context of agile software development.

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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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Outsourcing Experience Report – LogicLibrary and EPAM

LogicLibrary, provider of Logidex, has had an ongoing relationship with EPAM Systems, the largest Eastern European technology outsourcing vendor, for over three years to develop its Logidex technology. This experience report discusses the approaches and tools used by LogicLibrary and EPAM to ensure effective communication and coordination between LogicLibrary's Rochester, MN-based development team and EPAM's Minsk, Belarus-based development team.

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Agile at Scale: 7+7 Practices for Enterprise Agility
Part II of II - Seven Additional Practices For Enterprise Agility

In part I of this Article, we noted that the benefits of agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer needs and higher quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. However, these practices have been developed and refined in circumstances characterized by small, co-located teams with ready access to a customer. Can enterprises building applications that require hundreds of distributed team members benefit from these practices, or are they forever doomed to large, late, stage-gate and waterfall-like results?

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An Agile Approach To Managing Distributed Development
Traditional approaches to distributed development impair flexibility: they don't expose what's actually happening on the ground in different locations, they lack common and effective communication channels, and they substitute "hope" for "managed process" when reconciling work. Distributed development should be as responsive to change as co-located teams.  A program managing distributed development requires behaviors that engender agility.  Three contributing factors are release cadence, transparency of activity, and lightweight communications.

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Generating Real Value From Your Service Oriented Architecture

The question is no longer how best to automate business systems, but rather how to improve what's already been automated. We are nearly finished with the initial wave of IT adoption and most of what can be automated already has been. This means that the essential set of features and functions required to run a business already exists in some form. The trick is how to reuse and repurpose existing investments for additional value.

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