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In This Issue
Four keys to offshoring Business Analysis
Customer profile: MTS Systems
News Briefs
Today's tip from Coherent
Helpful Links
Industry resources to feed
your mind:
Getting Serious about Offshoring in a Struggling Economy
An article from Duke University's Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER)
Noop.NL
A blog dedicated to the management of software development
Earned Value Management The Agile Way
Can you do EVM on an Agile project? Decide for yourself
Lamba Functions are Ready for Prime Time
Functional programming for good old C++
ObjectMentor Blog
Software development best practices
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Four keys to reducing costs and speeding offshore development by offshoring Business Analysis
By Curt Bergmann, Coherent Solutions Delivery Manager
What’s
the secret to reducing cost and accelerating the delivery of offshore
software development? Move business analysis offshore, too! That's
right. There’s now a growing body of evidence that doing so will reduce
the costs of developing requirements while still maintaining high
quality (Powell, Piccoli, & Ives, Winter 2004), (Nath, Sridhar,
Adya, & Malik, October-December 2008). At Coherent Solutions, our
experience indicates that companies will achieve greater efficiency
from their programming staff by co-locating business analysts with
their offshore programming team.
In fact, we’ve established
four rules that will get you there quickly, based on our success with
hundreds of offshore development projects…
Read full article...
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MTS and Coherent Make Agile Development Work Across Borders
Agile
software development requires cross-functional teamwork and constant
communication. That’s especially true of the Scrum variation, which
emphasizes daily stand-up meetings (the “Scrum”) in which all project
team members answer three questions: What have you done since
yesterday; What are you planning to do today; and What’s preventing you
from accomplishing your goal?
The surest way to gum up the
works, say many agile adherents, is by parceling out tasks to offshore
developers and testers. They claim offshore resources can’t possibly
work as closely and collaboratively as co-located team members. Surely
time zone, language and cultural differences would stop the Scrum
process dead in its tracks.
MTS Software Development Manager Scott Fawcett has news for those who think this way.
Fawcett is in charge of MTS Systems Corporation’s multi-year effort to
develop its flagship MTS TestSuite™ materials and component testing
software product line. A first release last October came in on time and
budget and was met with enthusiastic customer appreciation. Much of the
credit goes to MTS’ industry-leading domain expertise in the science of
materials testing and its rigorous embrace of the agile development
Scrum process.
According to Fawcett, credit also goes to Coherent Solutions, a
software development outsourcing firm with offices in both Minneapolis
and Minsk, Belarus. “I don’t think we could have done it without them,”
Fawcett says. “Working on site and in Minsk, Coherent gave us extra
resources that were easy to plug into our Scrum process and the
flexibility we needed to respond to changing requirements.”
Read complete case study...
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Coherent Renews Gold Certified Partner status in Microsoft Partner Program for 4th year
Coherent
renewed its Gold Certified Partner status in the Microsoft Partner
Program for the fourth consecutive year with competencies in Custom
Development Solutions and Data Management Solutions. In addition, this
year the company added a third competency, Mobility Solutions. As a
Gold Certified Partner, Coherent Solutions has demonstrated expertise
with Microsoft technologies and a proven ability to meet customers’
needs. Microsoft Gold Certified Partners receive a rich set of
benefits, including access, training and support, giving them a
competitive advantage in the channel.
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PInvoke.NET: Decoding the mystery of the .NET managed-to-unmanaged boundary
Platform
Invocation Services (P/Invoke) is a feature of Microsoft’s Common
Language Runtime that enables managed code to call native code. Anyone
who develops a lot of .NET code knows that this sounds good in theory,
but can be challenging in practice because you have to know the right
method signature to use when calling P/Invoke. This is important
because sending the wrong data types to an unmanaged API can result in
memory leaks or other problems. Unfortunately, figuring out the right
types can be a frustrating exercise in trial and error. PInvoke.NET
is a wiki that documents the correct P/Invoke signatures to use when
calling unmanaged Win32 APIs. And to make life really easy, a
PInvoke.NET Visual Studio add-in is available, which allows developers
to search for signatures as well as submit new content from inside
Visual Studio.
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