Pantha Corporation

Across several blog posts, we have covered agile development for teams as well as agile development outsourcing for startups. It should not be a big surprise to anyone therefore, that we have been forwarding our experience in outsourced agile development to a growing list of clients.

What we offer are dedicated agile developer teams where the development is completely managed through us. Welcome to your outsourced project office.

We can do the writing of the user-stories (core story, wireframes and acceptance tests), the project management of the development (iteration planning, daily update meetings, status tracking & reporting) as well as the initial acceptance testing. What we find is that every project is different and we adjust our agile development outsourcing framework to these requirements. The existence of a concise framework allows us to quite rapidly set-up operations for new clients and ensures that learning's can be leveraged across our clients.

At the heart of all project management stands communication. We use a range of tools to support communication across distances. These are in no particular order Skype, conference-call rooms, project intranet and a fantastic collaboration/ white-boarding e-room. We've played with the idea of sending Mac Mini's out to clients that have a permanent team-size of >=5 to allow smooth video-conferencing via iChat (as opposed to the poor quality in Skype) but have yet to act on this thought.

We strive to provide the ultimate in transparency and as much information as possible as to the current status and delivery dates. And working in short iteration cycles of about 3-4 weeks, depending on the client, with tools (currently XPlanner, although we might start using TargetProcess) to monitor the progress of a project provides us with a wealth of information. Every day, a core group of people receives a daily update status mail that lists progress on the different stories we would be working on. Every other week, we issue a bi-weekly report and at the end of every iteration we issue a report on what was completed and moved to the next iteration.

It can be challenging to attempt agile development across distances and throughout the last year we have had many good learning experiences. Not everyone has a unit-testing framework for example so continuous testing and starting with tests is not an option (although we will propose implementing a framework at no cost as it will help us increase our overall throughput and raise code quality). Not having the customer with you means that acceptance testing feedback can be difficult to collect (we now do 'live' testing sessions using our e-rooms screen sharing and note-taking facilities). Knocking on doors to get quick feedback on interaction designs will not be possible (so we always start with a wireframe exercise, now using Axure to create very realistic demo's of the user-interface).

All in all though we know that the outcome using our agile development outsourcing framework guarantees our clients greater flexibility in their planning, increased ability to provide us with feedback that will actually be integrated, a better sense of the different project status and a higher overall output than compared with outsourced development teams operating "the old" way.

Soon we will provide some examples of how we perform our iteration planning sessions, keep clients on top of things and collaborate with them and our outsourcing team on project requirements and execution. We are considering providing a "test-drive" to a selected few interested parties tempted to try our agile development outsourcing services as well, more on that coming up.

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It is a commonly known fact by now that when a company is looking to create not only a simple, static-content website (for which transLucidonline blink, blink would of course be optimal) but wishes to re-use content, manage multiple sites with many editors, that an evaluation of open-source content-management-systems (CMS) is a very good option. I for one am actually of the personal opinion that for the vast majority of all cases it is *the* option to at least evaluate open- with closed-source CMS.

Lesser known is what to do when it comes to building a website that supports e-commerce transactions. There are now several viable options in the open-source world for companies to choose between for specialised e-commerce platforms. There seem to be so many in fact, that even I who is supposed to be an e-commerce "expert" hadn't heard about some of the new frontrunner's.

Following are three different platforms that i believe to hold the greatest potential in surviving the recent boost in e-commerce systems due to the large developer community and/or support from sponsoring companies supporting these open-source projects. I might add more detail to this "review" later on; for now, here we go.

1) OSCommerce; the princess of open-source e-commerce systems and probably the one that is best known with the largest developer community and a myriad of extensions. Good luck on picking your winner of the package to install and use, there are some packages that create a link with existing CMS such as Ubercart for Drupal

2) Magento which i was sent a link to by someone who had used it very successfully and who found the solution both architecturally very sound, easy to learn and enabling him to launch his site in a very short amount of time. They certainly have to still build a large following but there seems to be just an incredible drive from Varien, the company behind Magento which integrates really everything that you need to run a great e-commerce site in a nicely packaged form that will run out of the box.

3) OpenTaps (based on OFBiz) is astounding in terms of the feature scope it offers; this is clearly the choice for a company wanting to set up a full e-commerce operations, including ware-housing and customer-service. It is sponsored by the Apache Foundation, running under the "Apache Open For Business Project" based on Java technology. The feature list is simply too long to list, so check it out yourself. There is however a nice overview they provide on the opentaps site which i integrated below. Once again, this would be my choice to create the next Amazon.

Having worked at Amazon.de and Amazon.com for such a long time, i find it mind-boggling to see that there are now open-source platforms available that offer many of the same features and scalability that Amazon had 3-4 years ago. No need for a hundred developers, get yourself one or two and build your dream e-commerce site in under three months. It shows just how evolved the open-source landscape has become.

PS: While researching some of this entry, i found a wonderful review that a company called WebDistortion did on "9 kick ass open-source e-commerce platforms"; they provide a good overview of PHP solutions available.

PSPS: Following our post, this came in from a contributor to OFBiz (we are currently not allowing comments on our blog):
"The phrase "It is sponsored by the Apache Foundation" might be a bit
misleading - Opentaps has been started as a extension to OFBiz (notably with the financials and CRM components). But these days OFBiz has this functionality too (or it is being worked on) and Opentaps is considered rather a fork of OFBiz (I think the Opentaps people are telling that they just use the OFBiz framework...). One big difference is the license - Apache OFBiz is available under the liberal Apache License Version 2.0 whereas Opentaps uses the HPL/GPL license. IMHO there are few reasons to use Opentaps instead of OFBiz (of course as an OFBiz committer I'm absolutely biased ;-)."

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