InfoQ Homepage Outsourcing Content on InfoQ
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How External IT Providers Can Adopt DevOps Practices
IT suppliers can follow the “you build it, you run it” mantra by working in small batches, using an experimental approach to product development, and validating small product increments in production. The supplier has to find out what his client’s goal is, and it has to become the supplier’s goal as well to work in a collaborative way.
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Adding Agile to Lean at Toyota Connected
Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.
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Fin Goulding Injects Agility into the Management of Everything
Fin Goulding, international CIO at Aviva, recently spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about using flow principles to advance agile capabilities throughout an organisation. InfoQ asked Goulding to expand on some of the points that he made during his talk.
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Lean-Agile Procurement for Outsourcing
One of the last barriers to organisations becoming agile in their operations is the procurement process. At the recent Agilia Conference, Mirko Kleiner presented on Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to negotiating service contracts which involves procurement specialists, IT teams and suppliers, to move from a combative stance to a collaborative approach to addressing the customers’ needs.
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Agile in Dispersed or Distributed Teams
Cross-cultural team building enables collaboration and teamwork in dispersed or distributed agile teams. You need to invest to get the best out of a dispersed team. An exploration about what is needed to make agile work with dispersed or distributed teams.
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Ideas for Setting Up Remote Teams
Organizations are increasingly working with remote teams to discover that it can be challenging to establishing remote teams and collaborate effectively with people in remote or distributed teams. An interview with Janis Janovskis on the challenges of remote teams, working together in different time zones, using hangouts and experiments to establish remote teams and finding the right people.
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How to Manage Virtual Teams
When working with virtual teams the basic management tasks or responsibilities remain exactly the same, but checking if the work has been done and if the quality is sufficient tends to be more difficult. Successful collaboration is a shared responsibility of the virtual teams and the customer.
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Book Series on Managing Remote Teams
In the book series the art of managing remote teams authors share their experiences and provide advice on establishing and working with remote teams. The books are intended for people who are about to setup an offshore or nearshore team, or people who are already managing a remote team and want to improve.
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Using Agile to Build a Distributed Development Team
In "experiences with a distributed agile team", Joost Mulders and Andriy Korpan presented how they integrated a near shore development team from Ukraine in a Dutch product development organization using agile practices. At the XP Days Benelux 2013 conference they talked about the do’s and don’ts of distributed agile.
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Experiencing Language Barriers with an Improvisational Theatre Workshop
In the XP Days workshop Agile cross borders, Hoang-Anh PHAN & Anais Victor explored how you can deal with language barriers in a multi cultural organization. They work for the Vietnamese company Officience who provides outsourcing services to French customer, using the English language to communicate and work together.
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Flexible Contract Template Now Available
Following on from the announcement of the Flexible Contract model that supports agile development at the Agile 2013 conference, Susan Atkinson and Gabrielle Benefield have released a version of the contract under Creative Commons licensing and made it available for download.
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Qualifying An Agile NearShore Or Offshore Supplier
Fundamentally offshoring and nearshoring software development are at odds with the principals of agile software development. But the financial and labor supply realities of the world have forced this principal to be bent and teams now seek guidance on how best to qualify an agile nearshore or offshore supplier. This articles tries to take a deeper on this topic.
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Pradeep Soundararajan on the Negative Effects of Enforced Manual Testing
In his blog “Tester Tested!” Pradeep Soundararajan recently published an interesting show case called "Story from a company that built "the best software testing tool". The blog author describes what happens if for business reasons testers are forced to perform tests manually in a "boring" routine activity.
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ZeroTurnaround Release Results from Survey of Indian Developers at JavaOne
ZeroTurnaround have compared and contrasted the state of the technologies used for software development, and analyzed the tool-usage aspect of Indian productivity. The survey covers application servers (containers), IDEs, frameworks and build tools used by Java teams across India and globally.
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Using the RFP Process to Hire Agile
In large organizations and projects, it's not unusual for an Agile team to find itself shackled to a non-Agile partner/vendor/supplier. Friction ensues, energy is wasted. While the solution might appear to be: "hire better teams", Scott Ambler goes to the root of the problem, providing a strategy for creating better RFPs: ones that attract Agile teams.