Ivesia Solutions Inc

Organizations opt for contract staffing for many reasons. Some of these reasons include need for additional man power to get the job done; hiring manager needs a resource immediately to fill a open position and cannot wait for the HR to onboard the employee; and the company has exhausted all recruiting vehicles and cannot find a suitable employee. Addtionally the company wants to be doubly sure about whom they recruit and prefer the ‘try before you buy’ or contract-to-hire models. 

The business case for contract staffing is proven beyond doubt that it reduces risk and saves you money, time and energy. Whatever be the … Continue Reading

There are multiple ways by which you can staff your project team. Some of the options available would be to use existing resources, hire full-time employees, use contract resources or outsource the entire project to an expert company. Each of the options has its own merits and de-merits. Essentially, organizations should ensure the success of the project.

Some of the practices that organizations can adopt in fulfilling their resource requirements are:

1. Differentiate between strategic and non-strategic work and recruit full-time employees for strategic work and go with contract resources for non-strategic work

2. Where there is  a need for knowledge continuity and there is … Continue Reading

Whenever we engage with the customer, the most critical aspect will be to align our knowledge with the customer needs. This is especially true and complex, when you are talking about outsourced product development, as we ought to align our knowledge with our customer’s customer needs.

In my mind, product engineering is a domain and expertise by itself as the skills required to build a product are far different from the skills required to build an application. Product is never custom-built for a particular customer; rather it is generic and requires better skills to ensure that the code base is scalable, robust … Continue Reading

When you look at ISVs annual reports, their R & D spend remains consistently in the range of 15% to 20% of their turnover. With the global slowdown, many of them have reduced their R & D spend considerably and some of them even went to the extent of moving their product releases to a future date just to ensure that their liquidity is not compromised.

Mckinsey’s survey on R&D spend says that high performing innovators that have derived maximum benefits from R & D have in fact increased their R & D spend during 2009. These are companies that completely understands … Continue Reading

Though this has been a much debated topic for the last decade or so, it still remains a challenge for the enterprises. They don’t get to decide whether to buy or to build as each has its own pros and cons. In this post, I have covered this dilemma and try to offer an alternate option as well.

When should I buy software?

• Software offers a good fit for majority of your requirements
• Software can be customized to meet the remaining requirements; else the remaining requirements can be modified for the software
• License cost of the software is not very high and offers … Continue Reading
  

Most development is moving the agile way, when it comes to product development and it does make sense. Considering the previous statement is true, you have to be wary about the automation tool that you use, for most traditional tools would fail in an agile environment. Some of the reasons are, you cannot test last in an agile environment; scripts developed using proprietary tool vendor languages become unmaintainable; and installing them on every workstation becomes prohibitively expensive.

The way traditional test automation works, it just cannot support agile development. Take for instance the workflow - developers develop the code, test analysts design the … Continue Reading

Agile works well with small and co-located teams. Does this mean that agile cannot be used for larger enterprises that requires scaling, and in outsourcing engagements? It certainly isn’t the case as distributed teams are deriving value from agile development. Practicing agile in distributed environment is more complex than practicing agile in co-located teams, and it requires a lot of efforts to make this work.

In our experience, when we started making modifications in agile to make it work in distributed environment, we realized that it did offer a lot of benefits.   In fact, we have used agile methods even in our professional services engagements with … Continue Reading

Fixed bid projects are characterized by fixed time, predefined scope and fixed budget. Add to this, predefined quality checks. We will keep quality out of consideration for it can be never be considered a variable. The other three (time, scope and budget) can be considered variables. In most fixed-bid projects, none of them are allowed to be variables, which more often than not, lead to the project not meeting the expectations of stakeholders. Having all three of time, budget and scope fixed is very unrealistic and will most likely result in project failure. However, if we can change one of the … Continue Reading

I was having a conversation with an enterprise software vendor. He was mentioning that the biggest challenge that he faces is that he is not able to increase the adoption levels of his software and it is costing him dearly.  I just casually mentioned to him that the usabiilty of his software should be as simple as using a desktop productivity tool. I am not sure if this got him thinking, but it certainly got me thinking deep about how we do this at Ivesia. 

I just broke them down into user adoption challenges and the solution that Ivesia offers. I’ve just reproduced them … Continue Reading

I have earlier written in Part I about the challenges of a testing organization. We also touched upon shortly about the solution, which is a Testing Centre of Excellence (TCoE). In this post, let us see in detail what exactly a Testing Centre of Excellence is.
In a traditional model of testing, members of separate project teams do the verification and validation in the software development lifecycle. These teams need to … Continue Reading