Articles

Merging Waterfall and Agile: Across the Seven Seas

This s the story about how an onsite/offshore team delivered a fixed-bid project using agile practices. The delivery effort was very successful. This article highlights our approach, challenges and successes.

Daryl  Kulak's picture Daryl Kulak
Managing Offshore XP Teams: Organizational Models and Tools

The essence of Extreme Programming (XP) is making the customer a part of the team who works very closely with the developers, ideally communicating on a daily basis. However, what about a situation where your development team is offshore? Is it possible to have the best of both worlds, realizing the gains of offshoring without losing the benefits of XP? How do you keep the momentum and the communication flow going, at the same time ensuring seamless integration of the deliverables into the customer's production environment at the XP pace?

Peter Vaihansky's picture Peter Vaihansky

Better Software Magazine Articles

License to Open Source

Open source is widespread and growing in many software development organizations. While there's no purchase cost, the code does come with license obligations. Understanding open source from an intellectual property perspective can help avoid downstream legal.

Kamal Hassin
Remaining Relevant

Wondering how to maintain a competitive edge in this era of outsourcing and downsizing? Become an entrepreneur. Try managing your career as if it were a business, because in many ways it is. You will find your work more rewarding—and you'll increase your value to your employer.

Chad Fowler
Outsourcing: Twelve Tips to Make Outsourcing Work

More and more projects are being shipped overseas or outsourced to a contract company nowadays. However, managing an outsourced project is a risky task. Take home twelve hot tips that will help keep your project from getting burned. Ed Weller offers twelve tips to make your outsourcing experience better.

Ed Weller's picture Ed Weller
Remote Control

Between outsourcing and flextime, virtual development teams are fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. But can team members work together when they're so far apart? Read two stories of how real-life programmers are making it work.

Interviews

Amir Rozenberg Implementing Digital Transformation: An Interview with Amir Rozenberg
Video

In this interview, Amir Rozenberg, director of product management at Perfecto Mobile, says the success of a business depends on taking advantage of web apps that improve and simplify the customer experience, addressing options that will yield a successful implementation.

Jennifer Bonine's picture Jennifer Bonine
Paul Poutanen From One Expert to Another: Paul Poutanen

Paul Poutanen has developed extensive mobile expertise working in management for wireless hardware and cellular location firms such as Wi-LAN and Cell-Loc before launching Mob4Hire. In this interview with Jonathan Kohl, Poutanen discusses the complex global testing process for mobile devices.

Jonathan Kohl's picture Jonathan Kohl
Rajini Padmanaban Crowdsourced Testing: An Interview with Rajini Padmanaban

Rajini Padmanaban is the director of engagement at QA InfoTech. Heather Shanholtzer had the opportunity to interview Rajini and learn a bit more about crowdsourced testing and find out why it is better than traditional testing in some projects.

Heather Shanholtzer's picture Heather Shanholtzer

Conference Presentations

Implementing Outsourced Testing Services with a Third Party
Slideshow

Outsourcing test services are all the rage today. But are they really faster, better, and cheaper? Shelley Rueger shares how you can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your test process using a third-party test service. She provides guidance on how to determine if your product is...

Shelley Rueger, Moxie Software
Lessons From The Trenches – The Do's And Don'ts of Agile Outsourcing
Slideshow

Due to its ongoing rise in popularity 'Agile' methods are now being used on a wide range of projects, varying in size and complexity. As a result it's not uncommon for key project areas, like development, testing, UX, etc to be outsourced to 'on' and 'off-shore' companies. And although the decision to outsource is sometimes the right one for a project, outsourcing also comes with its own inherent risks. Using real world examples based on personal experience, Ade Shokoya will be sharing the do's and don'ts of agile outsourcing. Attendees will leave this session knowing how to identify and avoid the common outsourcing problems that could quickly derail your agile projects - and potentially cost you your job. Armed with this knowledge you'll be better positioned to improve your personal power and influence at work, and achieve your career objectives.

Ade Shokya
Back to the Basics: Principles for Constructing Quality Software
Slideshow

Using an analogy to the building codes followed by architects and contractors in the construction of buildings, Rick Spiewak explores the fundamental principles for developing and delivering high quality, mission-critical systems. Just as buildings are constructed using different materials and techniques, we use a variety of languages, methodologies, and tools to develop software. Although there is no formal "building code" for software, software projects should consider-and judiciously apply-the recognized "best" practices of static analysis, automated unit testing, code re-use, and peer reviews. Rick takes you on a deep dive into each of these techniques where you'll learn about their advantages, disadvantages, costs, challenges, and more.

Rick Spiewak, The MITRE Corporation
Offshore and Outsourced Test Automation Adventures

Organizations look at two ways to reduce repetitive testing costs-automation and offshoring. Although either can work, combining these two approaches has the promise of even more savings to organizations by freeing up their employees for more creative testing. Because both automation and offshoring are complex operations in and of themselves, combining them adds more risks and challenges that can lead to disappointment and a "double backlash" instead of a "double benefit" if not implemented with proven approaches. Test automation pioneer Hans Buwalda shares his personal "adventures" with offshoring and outsourcing automated testing. Organized along major challenges he's faced-methodology, automation technology, cultural differences, long distances, and hard to deal with time differences-Hans presents a set of failure patterns that are common in offshoring and offers practical suggestions for how to overcome them.

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear Corporation

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