Continued...
| GS100: 2011 Global Services Compendium | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Outsourcing to Third-party Vendors
With software product companies today facing the twin challenges of freeing up resources to work on new products and maintaining margins for legacy products, low end R&D work like QA/testing related to mature products is being offshored, either to captive centers or third party vendors.
Challenges faced by companies, especially small and medium sized ones, including higher total cost of ownership, high set up cost and lower productivity are also leading them to work directly with third-party providers. "The future of product development will be working with a lot of partners to innovate and build cutting edge products very quickly," said Jacob Hsu, CEO, Symbio at a webinar conducted by Global Services Media. ('Globalization Opportunities in Software Development for Enterprises and ISVs').
Be Agile to Win
Gartner, in their study Predicts 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions, say that as organizations seek to improve productivity and reduce application operating and maintenance costs, there will continue to be an evolution of software development tools, platforms and practices. To take advantage of this, organizations must shift structures and practices while embracing new technologies.
The study says that by 2012 “agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all software development projects”. Although Scrum will continue gaining in popularity over the coming years, organizations will not be successful in their transition unless they move toward a team-focused culture. Very few organizations use a pure-Scrum approach and most rely on a hybrid approach (waterfall and Agile).
The report says that organizations struggle to implement true collaboration in the context of globally distributed teams. A situation that has amplified in recent years with outsourcing and offshoring of software development projects.
On the other hand, teams who have successfully moved to Agile see productivity improvements especially in “the flexibility of the development team to respond to shifting requirements”. This is especially true for web-based application developments where rapid responses to a changing environment are critical.
Development organizations have been making a shift toward agile methods, but this is still slow to move beyond development, and often is a mixture of waterfall practices utilizing an agile or iterative project cycle”. Organizations that do not make use of key agile practices and do not invest in training and supportive tools’ infrastructure will find that a shift to pseudoagile, while potentially delivering a short-term productivity bump, will end in long-term declines in quality and productivity.
Read On : Testers going to be in high demand>>
| GS100: 2011 Global Services Compendium | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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