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Large software teams are rarely productive

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DQI Bureau
New Update

How do you assess the current practice of software development?



Prevailing software development practices lead to lot of waste and rework. The
traditional software development is based upon the assumption that the people

know exactly what they expect in the software. As the requirement keeps

changing, either the customer pays in the form of time and budget overruns, or

the team pays in the form of doing night-outs in the office. Dr Dobbs May 2008

Journal found that 82% of the 642 respondents of a survey reported productivity

increase after adopting Agile. The State of Agile Survey 2009 reported that

increased productivity was a very important reason for adopting Agile.

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Some of the large software companies use their scalability as an approach

to software development. Do you think this model is flawed?



We know it from the history that large software development teams are rarely

productive or successful. A good focused software development team should not

have more than ten members. As the team size grows, it gets harder to

communicate the requirements and design. Scalability is only useful if it leads

to higher productivity. Agile can also scale, but in Agile project we make sure

that the team size remains small and a team has all the skills available to

achieve the project goals.

Is Agile methodology one of the fastest growing ways to software

development?



Agile is emerging as the new approach to software development. Even those

enterprises where Agile has not been fully embraced, several Agile practices

such as daily stand-up, unit testing and short iterations are already in used in

the software development projects. Presently, there is no industry wide data

that is available about Agile adoption but large corporations and product

development companies are having a serious look at Agile.

How will Agile impact the Indian IT Industry?



Agile is great news for the Indian software industry because rising salary

costs and emergence of other low cost software outsourcing countries will force

us to look beyond mere cost advantage of India for overseas customers. Agile

methods can take the quality and productivity of our software industry to the

next higher level.

What is Xebias value proposition in the Agile space?



We share our best practices in the software community by publishing

articles, doing presentations and actively blogging about our experiences. We

are also very open to provide professional coaching in Agile transformation to

senior executives so that they can fund Agile pilot projects in their companies

and benefits from Agile movement.

Sudesh Prasad



sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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