What's good for a process

There is forever ongoing discussion where the golden middle between agility and sophisticated process for quality delivery is. Have clear examples for this.

A good process is like a train bringing you to a destination. Imagine, you're new to the virtual team, go to a tracker and can see all the ongoing things filtered by status or assignee. This is a way for better.

On the contrary, a bad process is pack of obstacles. Imagine, you're sitting at a desk and waiting for formal input (i.e. spec) from your colleague for obvious thing (i.e. database reconciliation). This is a stagnating way.

Demanding

Being demanding towards yourself and peers around is a well known success criteria.

A demand brings a quality through a competition. And that competition is hardly possible in corporate IT due to absence of powerful consumer.

Consumer needed. Where is a consumer?

Other story is with consumer IT, its low cost to enter the market and millions of users.

As a result, all sorts of organisations are borrowing ideas from consumer technology. Smartphones are leveraged for corporate communications. Advanced user experience approach and an in-depth search capabilities are applied to intranet application.

That all came from outside, from non corporate world, from consumer IT.

... read more in Economist article.

Who is senior

Have a clear definition on profile of Senior dev.

Senior dev does take over an uncertainty without clear requirements, quickly transforms it into a working prototype, ready to enhance it in an iterative mode.

The person who knows the solution but speaks on the barriers is not a senior at all.

Benefits of Fixed Price

Usually preferred engagement model for software service companies is Time & Material. Payment is rather stable and depends on FTE numbers then. The evil comes in some time, when it's evident that the principal delivery is often not working software, but humans.

New approach is to work via fixed price with special terms of selling specific volumes of action points or story points. Then the focus is on the work and performance criteria, as velocity, quality, technology profitability, and product value.

So Agile T&M wrapped into FP language matters!

Trunk or Branch

A strong team of ten developers deliver quick and smooth. You can count on numerous enhancements at one hop. Development is ongoing. One app component is being changed from several places by several programmers.

And then request for urgent release drop appears. Feature #N should be deployed now. Other features implemented in the same component did not pass QA yet. Tricky moment. In this case branching helps greatly.

Please note that time is consumed heavily anyway on incorporating of the feature into previous version of code.

Added value

The value of a role and a person acting this role is to be visible and clear. It's like a dish. If ingredient is taken out, the taste is different.

If PM is out of a cooking pan, these goals should not be lost out of sight:
- Delivery schedule is accommodated with customer expectations
- Assignments are spread equally through the resources
- In/out streams between analysts, developers (UI, database, middleware), QA, infrastructure, support, management, customer, and user communities are handled properly, quick in time and without missing parts. E.g. traceability matrix is supported.
- Resources are performing in acceptable zone (green, might be yellow, but not read)
- Achievements and various experience of parallel streams is taken into account

Why Ukraine

Reasons why Ukraine is worth to look at with regards to software outsourcing:

- Strong engineering traditions inherited from strong USSR science, resulting into visible positions in aircraft and aerospace industries

- About 5 000 engineers graduating each year from ~20 technical universities through the country
- About 15 000 professional working in ~50 companies on the market
- Network of dedicated development centers in 5 major locations (Kiev, Dniepropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv)
- Bandwidth Internet easy available throughout country at offices and home locations

- Special easy tax mode for working individuals

- English of developers at sufficient level to communicate directly with customer

- Location for Agile Eastern Europe conferences
- Top 5 of software outsourcing world destinations since 2007
- Named as best software outsourcing destination 2010

- Time zone close to UK (GMT +2)
- No VISA needed for holders of US and EU countries passports