E-Business & CMS application development with Scrum & XP

The client

The client is a multinational group, headquartered in UK , who mainly serves blue chip organizations globally to deliver commercial partner portals for a specific business domain. With millions of dollars invested on the project, they must find an Agile evangelist that matches their Agile philosophy and practices. With a small pilot project to demonstrate our technical capability, which lasts for two weeks counting for one sprint, ShineTech ultimately shines out of the competitions among other vendors in Russia and India .

“I have to say that I am quite impressed with the work your team has done on this project so far. I've been watching the demo with management team and what you have been able to demonstrate so far is looking good. Congratulations!” ---- VP of Engineering

 

What the client want

This outsourcing endeavor has several purposes from the client's perspective. The offshore teams need to debug and handle change requests for the live system, and upgrade the old legacy system to an advanced technology platform with Object Oriented Patterns. The teams also need to create demo programs to facilitate client's marketing campaigns, and thereafter develop highly targeted solutions for each paid customer, who is mostly multinational blue chip organization.

The project size

The project has lasted for over a year and is still evolving. With one year's pleasant cooperation, the two organizations have built a long term partnership. The project size grows from one team of 6 people to 3 teams of 15 people during peak business periods, with one Agile project manager / Scrum Master to facilitate the conductions of Agile practices, as well as with several technical leaders who are specialized and responsible for different areas of the project. The Scrum Master plays the role of communication façade most of the time with the onshore teams, and is also responsible for addressing any problem before they become issues to put strains on both sides.

Agile practice

Being Agile is a hard and struggling process for traditional IT shops, and being Distributed Agile is even harder. Research and our experience show that by carefully adopting agile practices in a distributed environment, it still can give customer very competitive advantages on cost saving and innovative work developing.

Beginning with the pilot project, we use test driven approach to develop a windows service program with installation wizards. After the successful demo, the client sent their deputies to do two-week onsite training. During this period, the offshore team gets to know the existing application, the domain knowledge, the daily workflow, and Agile/Scrum practices. We experiment remote pair programming and work together for some tiny projects just to make sure the cooperation can be smooth and fun. This is the trust building period. Getting to know each other will create the atmosphere of shared responsibilities and make each other accountable.

During the following development process, the team has been practicing Test Driven Development, Remote Pair Programming, Continuous Integration and many other practices came up in each iteration's retrospective meeting, which can incrementally improve work item estimate, delivery quality and help team maintain a sustainable pace with high morale. ShineTech team's seamless integration to the onshore team's daily IT operation has achieved significant budget saving for the client. Among the most important values that ShineTech delivered, helping clients to win their businesses and gain their customers satisfactions are paramount and long lasting. Thanks to the onshore Scrum Master's mentoring, who has over 20 years of project management experience and took Ken Schwaber's Certified Scrum Training. With continuous knowledge sharing, we discovered and experimented on various tools that ease distributed development and see the tangible productivity gain.

How can ShineTech cope with the decreased communication bandwidth, the remote customer, the decreased visibility and the decreased relationship and trust caused by the geographic barrier? Please request the complete case study.