O technologii i biznesie naszym zdaniem
Archive for kwiecień, 2010
Attended Agile Central Europe Conference
kwietnia 11th
This was second conference I attended recently but my first one completely related to agile. I also think (but may be wrong) that it was biggest ever agile conference in Poland. After a bit disappointing 4developers conference in Poznań I still had quite big expectations about ACE in Kraków and was not disappointed. I could feel that people attending breathe agile and have a lot of interesting opnions to share. So here’s a short review of what I heard and find interesting from my perspective.
First things first – we (I travelled with my colleague Paweł) almost missed a train because of slight misunderstanding of train schedule, that I got a fine on railway station and finally we were late for conference… not a greatest start ever. First speech I attended was by Rachel Davies, author of Agile Coaching, talking about retrospectives. Some good stuff and stressing that you should not skip retrospectives. One of conclusion was that we are not the only ones who have problems with time-boxing and retrospectives take too long. Suprisingly there were also comments about teams who do not have anything to say and think that they are perfect. One new idea for me was using funny drawings to show the emotions during sprint with so called emotions timeline – definitely would like to try that.
Afterwards I attended Scrumfluenca by Jens Korte. Jens put a lot of effort to create a graph of works that had influence on Scrum and Agile thinking in general, reaching even zen buddhism. Quite interesting but actually I expected something else.
Next one was Monika Konieczny talking about communication problems in a project. A presentation was very interactive and one of it’s elements was cooking live a birthday cake showing problems in communication between client (a husband ordering cake for his wife), team leader (getting requirements from husband and taking care of process) and developer (cooking cake). Later Monika was telling about coping with problems and generally about idea of using games and simulations to show client some concepts in a funny way. Also need to check page about Fun Theory which states that you can change people behaviour with something as simple as fun. Shall we try it with our clients?
Following two talks (Mack Adams and Simon Roberts) were about agile coaching (very popular term recently) basically stressing importance of having an Agile Coach in your company and how the coach should work so that results and agile thinking stick to organisation and people.
I started next day of conference with very interesting talk about Agile Culture gave by Zuzana Sochova. She pointed main problems in adopting Agile in companies, showing that most difficult agile practices are TDD, pair programming and estimating in points. Zuzana was also convincing us that based on her experience Agile is also widely using in life-critical industries and projects and we should not believe in statements that waterfall is only choice there. Conclusion for me after her presentation was asking myself a question if Espeo is truly a company with agile culture – I think not yet, but hopefully know how to get there. Very interesting was result of some poll, where question: “would you rather work for change or complain?” was asked. 81% of people were not sure (!)
Quite interesting for me was Pawel Lipinski’s presentation about being agile nearshore team, especially because of similar to Espeo remote work process. Too bad Pawel did not give too many conclusions but basically showed how his team was organized. One thing for me to remember is about conducting demos and idea that client should actually be “clicking” application during demo by himself, otherwise if we do it, client gets bored.
Next Paweł Brodziński was talking about Kanban so process similar to Scrum, a subject that I had in my plans for quite a long time. Final conclusion for me is that it’s much less formalized than scrum therefore it requires higher level of discipline from team itself. Because of this reason I think we should keep using Scrum but it’s something interesting to use to organize own time – it’s called Personal Kanban and is a bit similar to Getting Things Done – a process that I’ve been trying to use for some time.
Last presentation I attended was given by guys from UK based company New Bamboo – this was the funniest one during whole conference. They were showing some small solution for problems in software development house, for instance having commit conflicts, how they are solving it you can see in a video.
[some problem with video will add it later...]
Summing up, it was a very nice experience, I met a lot of interesting people and have many new ideas for Espeo. New experience for me was also seeing that so many people nowadays use Mac computers, and Twitter – some part of attendees was all the time doing live commentary from conference. Maybe it’s also time to start using Mac and Twitter?
Outsourcing software development to Poland – a new destination for professional IT services
kwietnia 2nd
Many European IT companies, especially the ones from Western Europe, decide to outsource their software development tasks, in order to increase their profit through reducing development costs. The reason for this is that these costs are the major and highest ones in the whole software development process. In such case IT providers outside Europe are being chosen mostly, where prices are significantly lower than average European level. But then serious drawbacks of this solution begin to reveal.
First of all communication issues occur. Foreign countries, far away from Europe, may be in different time zone – so time difference is serious and time span to communicate bilateral is much shorter. Furthermore there could be different cultural habits, so even such trivial thing like different national holidays and ceremonies, free of work, may harm communication between parties. Not to mention other cultural and legal distinctions – like different labour policies, pauses in work, number of working hours allowed in a week etc. On the other hand there is also distance, what we must take under our consideration – sometimes there is need to work on site, not always remote working is possible or required. Thus we must take into account significantly higher transportation fees, as usually the ordering party, not the provider, pays it.
Last but not least is the most important drawback – serious quality lacks. All difficulties mentioned above lead up to substantial problem with maintaining constant quality control and jeopardise the overall outcome. For most demanding clients and complex projects it is unacceptable.
But there is a solution. Just outsource your software development from Europe to… Europe! Doesn’t make sense? Actually it does – you can find in Europe a country, where no communication, cultural, territorial or quality issues occur. source: Wikimedia CommonsIt is 
Poland – central European country, with IT professionals meeting highest European quality standards, but still with labour costs considerably lower than in Western Europe. Thanks to being a member of the European Union, Poland is a convenient partner in software business, because there are no legal obstacles to cooperate with Polish IT companies both remotely and on site.
What about the quality? Polish programmers have always shined with their outstanding programming capabilities – which is why some of the world’s best known technology companies, including Google (with currently 2 research centres in Poland), Motorola and IBM (in collaboration with Wroclaw Research Centre), have decided to set up research centres just in Poland. Polish IT professionals have very strong academic background what guarantees the highest level of IT developers’ education. Adducing the last TopCoder’s country rankings (TopCoder is the world’s largest competitive software development community with 226,851 developers representing over 200 countries) 4 polish universities have placed the top 25 school worldwide: University of Warsaw (1st place in 2005!), University of Wroclaw, Jagiellonian University and Poznan University of Technology.
Staying with TopCoder competitions – these programmer rankings are based on individual and university achievements and Poles regularly lead both sections. In 2005 Poland has left the US behind and taken first place in TopCoder’s country ranking. Currently (2009) Poland take third place.
Listed below are some more of the successes achieved by Polish programmers – in the Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition, hosted by Microsoft Corporation:
- Imagine Cup 2009 (Cairo, Egypt):
MashUp – second place
Interoperability Award – second place
H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak Special Award – winner
- Imagine Cup 2008 (Paris, France):
Embedded Development – third place
- Imagine Cup 2007 (Seoul, South Korea):
Algorithm – first place
- Imagine Cup 2006 (Delhi, India):
Algorithm – first, second and third place (!)
As highlighted above – Poland turns out to be a perfect destination for outsourcing software development, with no obstacles typical for outsourcing countries outside Europe, with outstanding IT capabilities and highest quality standards but still in attractive prices. Sounds like a bargain – and in fact it is! So when you are going to develop a software and you need to enlarge your development team for this or you simply don’t have staff available to make it – don’t hire anyone but use outsourcing to Poland. It is fast and convenient way for delivering high quality, complex software on place, on time, on budget.