Sept 13th 2006 | Issue 01

Agile development from offshore?

"Agile Development" and "internationally distributed teams" are two of the hottest recent trends in the software development community. While Agile methods have been used for a few years, they are being adopted more frequently by software developers in response to the need for rapid, iterative requirement changes and short delivery cycles for business value in today's "Show-me!" environment.

Agile methodology can make offshoring harder or easier, depending on the team capability and discipline on both sides. Needless to say it is a double edged sword.

If practiced with discipline, it can help cut development time and effort. On the other hand, it can rapidly deteriorate into a blame game and yield little or no results if not executed well, with a mature team.

The core agile concepts of "iterative development" and "continuous integration" - the processes by which developers build code and integrate their code with the entire system in "rapid-fire cycles" directly address two major challenges of offshore development - visibility into project status, and elaborate documentation.

The short iterative development cycle, delivering working software at end of each iteration provides a clear measure of the progress. Continuous integration moves the emphasis of documentation right down to source code - communicating to everyone in the team of changes and progress made on a daily basis.

While offshore outsourcing of software product development is still challenging, , it may seem rather risky to embark on offshore agile development. Like any other offshore outsourcing project, careful planning and an accomplished offshore vendor with a proven track record can help ensure success. After all several agile development projects have been executed from offshore facilities to date.

If you'd like to learn more about how Agile development techniques can work for offshore models and help you go-to-market quickly, please contact us at www.trigent.com.

Hello and welcome to our new newsletter, Trigent Insights.

Every week, we'll cover a topic of general interest to the business world, and also include a few snippets of some of the interesting news at Trigent.

We hope this weekly newsletter of brief articles will grow to become an insightful source of information for you.

Trigent Software is an Outsourced Software Development company, with hundreds of clients all over the world. Our services include offshore software development, product development, product support, product internationalization, quality assurance and offshore web development.

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Coming up next week: Achieving 24 x 7 product support with Offshore technical support

Trigent Software, 2006