Posted on February 26th, 2009 in Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
Just a quick announcement that the beta period for Silver Catalyst is scheduled to end on March 1 (Sunday).
Remember, any projects created during the beta period will be automatically upgraded to Premium for free. After that date and you’ll need to start paying for premium projects. In other words, if you were thinking of signing up for Silver Catalyst, do so fast 
Not sure what a premium project is? Check out the Silver Catalyst pricing page for an overview of the pricing and subscription plans.
Posted on February 25th, 2009 in Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
We have just announced the pricing and subscription plans for Silver Catalyst. Check out the Silver Catalyst pricing page for all the details. Please do give any feedback that you might have at our support community.
Posted on February 19th, 2009 in Agile by siddharta || No Comment
Yesterday’s Economic Times has an article on how Virtusa is using distributed agile to benefit it’s customers.
Virtusa claims that the agile software development combined with the concept of global delivery model is receiving increasing attention from IT organizations globally, given its ability to deal with changing business priorities and short delivery cycles among others.
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US-headquartered Virtusa has global delivery centers in Colombo, Hyderabad and Chennai, besides offices in the UK and US. The company’s third quarter of fiscal 2009 was $ 44.9 million, a 6% growth year-on-year.
Mr Ratnayake said the traditional “waterfall” type of development involving strategy, development, maintenance and testing was giving way to the agile methodology where the client’s changing requirements were addressed and delivery cycles could be shrunk.
Check out the whole article here.
Posted on February 14th, 2009 in Agile by siddharta || No Comment
The article that follows first appeared in the Tools For Agile newsletter.
It’s not enough to follow a set of practices to be agile. You also need to understand the principles behind them. Many teams that are adopting agile for the first time make the mistake of following a set of practices without understanding them fully. In today’s feature story, we’ll take a look at a few common situations of dysfunctional agile
- You do a daily standup meeting, but it takes an hour – A standup meeting should take 10 mins max. The idea is to keep the team informed, then get on with work. Long meetings are BORING.
- You implement a feature in one iteration and test it in the next iteration – A common mistake is to develop features in one iteration and hand them over to the testing team to test in the next iteration. This sort of phased handover can cause problems. Instead, do the testing in the same iteration that a feature was developed in.
- You have iterations, but you don’t make a release at the end of the iteration – It’s not enough to use iterations. The mantra is to have working, running software at the end of every iteration.
- The Project Manager/ScrumMaster plans the iteration – Agile works best with self organized teams. Leave it to the team to figure out what to do and how to get things done.
- You never talk to the customer/end user – Agile relies on feedback to make sure you’re building the right software. If you don’t ever show the releases to your customer, then you can end up with software that they don’t want.
There are many more of course, but these are some of the more common ones. Are any of your practices on this list?
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