Achieving Offshore Agility
1
White Paper
Achieving Off‐shore Agility
Ali Zaidi Research and Development Team
www.ephlux.com
White Paper
Achieving Offshore Agility
Why Agile? By meaning, agile is a development approach that speeds release and control costs by minimizing overhead, guarantees closer fit to business needs through stronger association, and decreases menace through swift releases of precious and utilizable business functionality. Purposely a break from the “heavy‐weight,” process‐intensive methodologies used earlier, agile gets its name from its flexibility and compliance to react to change all over the development cycle. Thus, agile because: ∞ It’s a set of values and practices for engineering better software. Re‐ energizing the way software is projected, built and tested; agile practices are extremely attractive to developers. These practices are faster, economical and less dicey than conventional, colossal development methodologies. ∞ A group of “light” methodologies. Agile principles and practices are the foundation for many other methodologies. Examples include: Scrum, XP (Extreme Programming) and Crystal. Two themes cut across fields, Off‐ shoring/Outsourcing and Agile Framework. That is because outsourcing continues to affect more people from different cultures, different time zones, different languages, and different customs. Similarly on the application service providers off‐shoring has influenced business analysts, project managers, developers and executives. To coup with this pace of dynamism and diversity organizations and development centers are sliding towards Agile Framework.
∞ Proven in practice. Although new relative to the other major categories of methodologies, agile practices have been in use since 2000 and have a long track record of successful project delivery. Agile success stories are widely published, touted by analysts and presented at conferences. ∞ Growing in use within enterprise IT. Use of agile methods has grown steadily since their inception. Agile adoption began in software development companies and has since expanded throughout government and industry sectors. ∞ Here to stay. Methodologies and gargantuan development practices come and go. Agile’s causal set of guidelines, however, will influence IT practices and fabricate positive business value for many years into the future. These belief, combined with agile’s flexibility and receptiveness to change, will enable agile methods to evolve to handle new needs and technologies.
What is Offshore Agility? Agile methodologies are rising as the solution to flexible, reactive software engineering. We'll start to see more business’s scaling Agile approaches with the established strategies contained in older methodologies such as RUP, as well as fresh methods such as Agile Modeling. Now that it's crossing the abyss the die‐hard worrywarts are starting to recognize that the writing is on the sky that Agile works very well in practice by disciplined development teams
www.ephlux.com
White Paper
2
Achievingg Offshore Aggility
Essentials for Acchieving Offshore Agility
Reelationship Reespect Co ompetence Atttitude Ad daptiblity
Businesss Analytics The naturre of analysis has changed. Some decades aago analysis w was seen as a transform mational practtice within a ssequential project liffecycle. With the rising reccognition of object‐oriientation in th he 1980s and d 1990s analysis w was soon seen n as part of an n iterative and incremental proce ess, and in thee new millennia the character of analysis iis transform ming once agaain. Today analysis is better envvisioned as a highly collaborative, iterative, and incremen ntal activity in nvolving both deveelopers and sttakeholders. The evolution of the analyssis process neecessitates an evolution in the way that busineess system analysts (BSAs) work, aand in many ssituations n favor of this function arguably disappears in developerrs who are ge eneralizing sp pecialists. The principle of an Agile project is to provide m value to the e client as soo on as maximum possible. Now the p perfect situattion would bee when you have business users & developers w who agree and abidee by this sentiiment. Any teeam member
who has interacteed with busin ness users on a dium to large project will h have faced med situaations where it has been h hard for the business users to come to con nsent on whatt they ndividuals are usually wantt. Business in representatives o of different fu unctions of the orgaanization. Keeeping these ussers attentivee on whatt we set to acchieve when w we started engineering the ssoftware is wh hat a BA doess. Being on an agile framework ggives the business userrs many chancces to dream,, many chancces to make changes. Deevelopers aree creative too o. While Theyy dream abou ut technologyy at its best. W sometimes this caan lead to som me really creaative / uniique / usable features in the product. Man naging these d dreams, ideass, changes so as to keep p them associiated to the o original busineess objeective and deliver most value in the giveen timee and budget is what a BA does. Whaat agile teamss aims at, is to o start at a minimal point and d alter as req quired. When a ory turns out to be a big lu ump small bug on a sto nhanced funcctionality, we create a new w of en storyy. The respon nsibilities men ntioned abovee, along with writingg user cases, sustaining of the functio onality, planning implementation o d releases, testing the the iiterations and deveeloped functio onality, etc. ttogether makes for a sub bstantial porttion of work. That's when you create a separatee role called B Business Analyysts. Adaptive Projecct Management Single‐point projeect managem ment from botth partners should kkeep the iteraative decisions, chan nges, conflictss and deliveries on track to o meeet the project objectives. TThe ever‐increeasing denssity of software will burden project managers with m more people to o manage. W We also observe a drift towards a vast amount of simp ple' projects ccaused by thee ever‐increassing auto omation of sm mall and mid‐ssized compan nies
www w.ephlux.com m
White Paaper
3
Achieving Offshore Agility
using out‐of‐the‐box or hosted applications. This will also leave project managers with more projects and more people to manage. In order for project managers to be able to handle all of the extra work, they need more information, business knowledge, management skills and education. You will be looking for a true Project Management of Knowledge with at least command in the following areas: ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Psychology Sociology Organizational Behavior Language Complex Adaptive Systems
Self Learning Disciplined Teams There days many organizations practicing Agile processes are expecting team members to be multi‐talented and be able to work in variety of situations. We often hear the terms like "Self‐ Organizing" or "Self‐Managing" teams in the Scrum world. In software development we have learned that the software is becoming more and more intricate as the variables of technology and requirements change. In the conventional project management, the project manager was held responsible of the Risks, Complications, Deadlines, Release Plan, Testing, Documentation and etc. On the converse the self‐organized team is set of individuals with diverse skills that complement each other. This team is ordered and re‐organized depending on the project demands, schedules and closing date. This team wears diverse hats depending on the circumstances. This team works on a
straight forward statute that "Tell me the actions; but don’t tell me how to act". The team realizes how much work can be done in a precise sprint. Nothing is as de‐motivating as someone else consigning on your behalf. It’s very encouraging to fulfill the responsibilities that you have committed to. A team can be cross‐functional and to such a degree that a developer might do testing when there the testing resources are swamped. Each team member works towards a functional or tangible task for a day. This reflects in everyday scrum meeting by these self‐organized questions: •
What did I accomplish from yesterday morning
•
What do I want to achieve till tomorrow
•
Are there any stumbling blocks for my work
Self‐organizing teams are definitely different from the conventional Manager Managed teams; but it’s a definitely wonderful tool for greater productivity and a fresh breath of air for many. Quality Control and Self Control QA leadership needs to work hard to educate and guide the senior managers to understand the value of quality, and to accept the up‐front cost. Quality Assurance is a part and constant match up of quality management proving fact‐based external assurance to customers and other stakeholders that a product meets needs, expectations, and other requirements. QA guarantees the existence and success of actions that attempt to make sure ‐ in advance ‐ that the expected levels of quality will be reached.
www.ephlux.com
White Paper
4
Achieving Offshore Agility
Within an agile development, the customer is continuously involved and well‐versed. A further best practice in agile development it to guarantee that the acceptance criteria for all requirements are documented and well understood during the requirements gathering and iteration planning stages. Ideally, the corroboration that development of the requirements meets the acceptance criteria is also preset. So, again, it is the responsibility of the product owner in creating requirements and the customer working with the developers to assure "projected levels of quality" are achieved. The tester having been freed from a lot of labor‐intensive, tedious control and assurance testing can then provide value in performing investigative testing. Using a tester's natural ability to hunt out instabilities in the system and looking at the system from a high level and turning things on their side as only a try tester can do. Communication and Collaboration over Command and Control Communication is the key parameter in development and especially in Agile Framework. Agile Development brings ease once you commit to heavy communicate with a proximity counter‐part team getting us inform of everything, your team requires to know both
IT & Business, pro‐actively scouting to provide us clear global vision of situations, having personal contact with project stakeholder from Project owner to deployment team. Agile Tools Tools are crucial to Agile projects' success. Tools for software configuration management (SCM), unit testing, and software builds and build management are vital factors on Agile projects. Other tools are less critical but can definitely add value. As more IT shops begin using Agile practices, the demand for tools that support these practices — notably refactoring, test‐ driven development (TDD), automated testing, continuous integration, collective code ownership, and management — will increase. Several project management tools are specifically meant for agile development. They are intended to assist diagram, track, analyze and integrate work. These tools play a significant role in agile development, as a way of Knowledge Management. Common features of an Agile Tool include: Version control integration, progress tracking, effortless work allocation, integrated release and iteration planning, dialogue forums, reporting and tracking of software defects.
www.ephlux.com
White Paper
5