Tag: organization

Intellectual Property Management Issues for Development

To maximize intellectual property (IP) value and mitigate risk while operating in an open source application development environment, enterprises need to understand the distinction between real and perceived risks and values by utilizing processes, governance and tools. This is particularly important when involving an outsourcing partner. A lack of intellectual property capture and protection makes it harder for the outsourcing company to move from one outsource vendor to another.  As a software development "value chain" evolves over time, with changes in the business and technology environments, the value of leveraging open source software may grow or decrease in value. So it makes sense to understand and review open source arrangements.  In this scenario, if the intellectual properties associated with managing and producing the product are no longer available, significant flexibility will be lost. 

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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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“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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CASE STUDY: Learning.com

Portland, Oregon-based Learning.com is a fast-growing software company providing online services to students and teachers to help integrate computer technology and education into their curricula. With a user base of over 30,000 teachers and over 1.5 million students accessing its subscription-based hosted products, Learning.com must continue to innovate and meet market needs while continuing to provide robust and scalable products.

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Make SOA Governance A High Priority

Today's enterprises face growing regulatory pressures with legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, the Patriot Act and others. As a result, corporate and IT governance - the processes, controls and reporting infrastructure over business and IT activities, respectively - are becoming progressively more pervasive as a means for providing the compliance infrastructure necessary to satisfy this list of complex regulations. Combine this increased pressure for corporate traceability and visibility with the "next big thing" in software, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and you have a challenging governance environment to say the least. SOA's loosely-coupled nature forces IT away from monolithic application development and deployment, and as a result it greatly increases the number of moving parts that must be managed and governed.

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Agile Processes: Making Metrics Simple

IT organizations, and in particular application development departments, are increasingly under pressure to provide performance and compliance metrics to justify annual spend.  Unfortunately, many metrics campaigns collapse under their own weight: there's no shortage of things to measure, the scope is greater than first appears, measurement needs to happen frequently, and collection is a distraction to traditional software delivery operations. By comparison, Agile processes are uniquely well suited to metrics, providing measurements transparently and consistently as an extension of day-to-day operations. Framed in a scorecard, information collected during an Agile project provides a comprehensive analysis of delivery excellence at the project, program and department levels. 

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FEATURED BOOK: Agile Project Management with Scrum - by Ken Schwaber

Scrum is one of the most widely used Agile processes in the US and around the world. Why is this? First of all, Scrum is easy to adopt because it makes sense to development teams and empowers them to deliver value through software products. And, it's also a very practical approach in that it does not prescribe specific development techniques and so it can be adopted by companies with a range of legacy processes and tools in place. From software vendors to corporate IT organizations to offshore consultancies, teams using Scrum are successful in delivering valuable software faster.

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