Distributed Agile

"Agile is an iterative and incremental approach to software development performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams with "just enough" ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner to meet the changing needs of its stakeholders"


Process

We understand the challenges of outsourcing –
  • Changing needs
  • Distributed team handling requirements management, planning and work distribution
  • Right infrastructure
  • Cultural differences
  • Time zones
  • Communication and collaboration, risk mitigation, business continuity .

At Proteans, Distributed Agile is a development methodology that adheres to the principles of Agile Development Methodologies (ADM) like SCRUM (and others) and emphasizes the use of tools and metrics to successfully collaborate and measure productivity in a globally distributed development environment. In addition to enhancing the speed and agility, Distributed Agile brings in scalability and predictability to quality and product release based on tool-based measurement and management of metrics. Distributed Agile powers Proteans delivery process enabling us to focus on delivering the highest business value to customers in the shortest time.

Proteans Distributed Agile covers –
Requirements
  • Capturing software and associated requirements, prioritizing and tracking meticulously
  • Using Modeling
  • Implementing best practices - prototyping, writing usage stories, planning for performance

Development and Testing
  • Agile Software Development - time-boxed iterations, incremental, continuously verify for quality, get regular feedbacks from customer and extensive use of automation for improved efficiency
  • Code quality / Refactoring - continuous code review, no single owner of code
  • Testing - test driven development

Planning, Project Management & Risk Management
Our experience in product migration (or re-platforming) spans across:
  • Planning for engagement initiation, release, sprint with active coordination between onsite /offshore team
  • Project management - manage requirements, people, risks, metrics collection to measure performance, introspect, review and implement learning
  • Tracking, Monitoring and measuring progress
  • Risk Management - Identify risks, define mitigation plan

Infrastructure, Collaboration and Communication
  • Infrastructure - setting different environments - development, testing, staging, VPN; availability of right tools - development, build, test, project management
  • Collaboration - helps eliminate the challenges arising due to geographically dispersed teams; techniques used - daily meetings / con-calls at both the organization as well as local levels; integrated communication and collaboration tools that help build a common visualization of the product - track project artifacts, use common source control and employ continuous integration

Scalability
  • Highly scalable for large, complex projects as it merges the best practices of agile development approaches with Proteans process discipline and project management framework

Management Reviews
  • Conduct regular view of engagement progress by key stakeholders for tactical and strategic progress
  • Hold regular meetings to discuss on continual improvement, progress and review of business goals and objectives

 Continual Improvement
Proteans lay great emphasis on continual improvement and focus on metrics to capture vital metrics      that drive engineering decisions.

Benefits to software product companies
  • Accelerates the time-to-market through iterative releases of the working software while retaining process discipline and metrics orientation required for large, complex projects
  • Reduces engineering costs by enabling agile development across globally distributed teams
  • Enhances flexibility and scalability for product releases even while retaining the best practices of agile development
  • Focuses on specific metrics that help concentrate on the business value delivered