Outsourcing for quality

Some people think that outsourcing is about minimizing the costs by moving work to wherever rates happen to be lowest at the time. The costs of distributing software teams can be high however and such a strategy may fail to reduce costs at all, and worst of all it can impact quality and agility.

There are good reasons to distribute teams however - for example to maximize quality by picking the best available expertise.
Ivis found such a partner in SwiftTeams who are based in St Petersburg. Their expertise in graphical editors for development tools is second to none, and the xProcess product has benefited enormously as a result.

How then do you overcome the difficulties of planning and coordinating teams that are geographically distributed? This is one of the key motivations of course for deploying xProcess. It provides the key visibility and communication layer and minimizes the negative impact of having a few thousand miles between the sponsors, planners and specifiers and the implementers. A number of key enhancements to xProcess in recent months have been motivated by improving our application of the Scrum process with SwiftTeams. We'll be looking for more in the coming months too.