Agile based Development

Greetings to all readers!!!  This article talks about agile based development that is happening in Qvantel & its clients. I have practiced agility in ST Ericsson, Grimstad, Norway (my onsite @ client place). The crux of agile development in Grimstad is management of requirements in the form of backlogs & Project planning via shared concepts. Continuous involvements of team lead to smooth execution of the over all program. Let’s see the Manifesto for Agile Software Development

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by experiencing agility and helping others to experience the same.

Through this work we have come to a value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

Hope this simple manifesto helped you to understand the methodology, or people who know this already, may love to read this once again.

Agile’s key challenge is breaking the system into small components, but still keeping an eye on the big picture, Generating buildable and testable code, keeping the user stories in mind. Actually, when starting the agile based test system design, I found myself writing short use cases and grown to such an extent that, I keep on generating the use cases till the end of the backlog.

When asked, what comes in your mind, if it comes to ‘Agile Process’ to Qvantelite Muqeet Khan, he said, The Agile process attracts attention because of its principles and practices. It’s about culture and way of thinking. An agile culture is established when the 3 major groups come together within a company.

Executive management endorses the agile principles; it makes the working managers learn to coach instead of direct. Project team understands and supports agile principles and practices. Agile process is evolved through continuous inspection and adaption. It generates agility from teamwork, self-organization and accountability.

Let’s meet again in the next blog post. Comments? Suggestions? Please Post them!! We would love to hear them!!

September 1, 2010 at 2:21 pm ravindranantonysamy Leave a comment

Technology Startups Outsourcing?

There are several reasons why technology startups should consider outsourcing.

In the three part series, we will cover why tech startups should outsource, what they should outsource and most importantly whom they should outsource to.

Here is the first article on why tech startups should outsource.

Part I – Why Tech Startups Should Outsource

Startups are made up by passionate entrepreneurs who hit upon the big idea, go on to raise money and then build the customer base. Startups are always starved of the right talent, and startups always have too much to do and few hands to deliver! This has been clearly expressed by the founders across several startups we have spoken to in the US and Europe.

It is a well recognized fact that founders and key members spend significant time in building their team.  The cool guys working at a startup end up doing many different things, right from product architecting, coding and obviously business development and marketing. This is very challenging and exciting, however there are several times, when the startup finds itself in a position where it is not able to deliver.

Startups need to analyze what is core and what is non-core and focusing on the core activities while outsourcing the non-core activities to an able third party. Unfortunately, it is not always apparent for the management to figure out what is core and what is not-core to their business. It is definitely easy to figure out that payroll management is not a core activity for a tech startup, but is there clarity that a startup designing a low power medical device should focus on the ‘low power’ part of their business and not worry about the API that connects the medical device to a management system?

Relentlessly asking questions about what is core, and what is not, would help the startup to focus on its core competence. Once the core competence is established, the job becomes easier to deliver and meet the product development milestones, as long as there are right partners to help in those non-core areas.  It is even more attractive from a cost perspective if the partner is able to deliver the ‘non-core’ area at a much lower cost than what the startup would have ended up spending.

There is also another reason why startups should outsource. Many of their peers in the industry are successfully working with offshore centers and delivering products well in time and at lower costs. Offshore centers provide access to a large talent pool at reasonable prices. This kind of a product development brings cost effectiveness to a startup and at the same time, extends the investor’s dollars. Many venture capitalists probably do ask entrepreneurs about their outsourcing plans.

A far sighted CEO of a startup who is able to overcome the objections related to the difficulties of working with an offshore partner would quickly realize the business benefits in terms of faster product development cycles and lower costs. The standard objections that come into mind like, IPR protection, time-zone differences, cultural differences seem too minor compared to the benefits of gained through the well established model of outsourcing product development.

- Rajesh Sengamedu, VP- Business Development and General Manager

August 31, 2010 at 5:41 am rajeshsengamedu 1 comment

Welcome To Qvantel Blog: Delivering Your Vision!

Hi!

The very fact that you have visited this page means that you have a vision and probably we could help you realize your vision!

We have not been active in the social media so far. Rightfully so. Most of our business has been either repeat business, has come through references or word of mouth in the physical world. FYI, some of the customers like TDC have been with us for over 10 years!

We apologize for not reaching out to a wider set of people and sorry that we have been cocooned in our journey so far. We have had a good run, as a company so far, with about 140 people in the company, running truly multi-national operations, with presence in Finland, India, Sweden and Norway. We just announced opening of our Bangalore Development Center last month which is our second Center of Excellence in India.

Albeit ‘European – Indian’ by company culture, we believe we can reach out to a larger customer base through the social media and help them in delivering their vision.

Through this blog we hope to talk to you, express our thoughts on various topics of business interest – be it, in the customer care & billing, mobile software /application development, managed services, business intelligence services or even about the general Cloud!

We welcome your comments and hope we will build a dialogue with you soon. We also welcome guest blog writers who wish to write articles on our blog. Please feel free to contact us at guestwriters at qvantel dot com

Welcome to the Qvantel Blog – ‘Delivering Your Vision’

August 13, 2010 at 12:55 pm Mahender Nandikonda 1 comment