Pragmatic Outsourcing

A Few Words on UAT

Nick Krym — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:53:36 +0000

This post continues with the topic I started a few months ago – using QA to prevent serious issues with offshore deliverables. In particular I’d like to cover User Acceptance Testing (UAT). For many software professional UAT has a very clear definition and lucid goals and objectives, yet this understanding at most foundational level varies [...]

Offshore QA and a Sly Fox

Nick Krym — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:36:42 +0000

A fairly common model for working with an offshore vendor for SaaS companies is based on black box model – the requirements collected locally go to offshore team and code ready for production comes back, sometimes in a form of binaries. There are variations to that model with the same common thread – the [...]

Offshore BC & DR

Nick Krym — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:30:38 +0000

Thinking about Nostradamus predictions for 2012 and all cataclysms that will strike that year? Afraid and developing your bullet proof Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC&DR) plans? Well, if meteors, super-volcanoes, and melting ice caps flatten, burn, and flood most of humanity those BC&DR plans won’t matter much. However, increasingly more powerful [...]

Force Majeure

Nick Krym — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:21:23 +0000

Force Majeure (French for “superior force”), is a common clause in contracts which essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term “act of God” (e.g., flooding, earthquake, volcano), [...]

Environmental Fears

Nick Krym — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:08:56 +0000

As I mentioned in At Doorsteps of a New Engagement I have a new vendor to deal with. It is a company that has been working with my team for over two years and thus it’s only new for me. It took about a few days for me to encounter the first set of [...]

At Doorsteps of a New Engagement

Nick Krym — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:21:58 +0000

I finally started working in my new role, VPE / CTO of PDR Network. It took almost a full year of non-stop activities on two complex M&A projects to get to this point. Medem and its assets moved on to two different organizations and I followed one of those assets. “Asset” in [...]

Herding Cats

Nick Krym — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:21:54 +0000

You most likely have seen that commercial. I think EDS has a great point here, managing software organizations is very much like herding cats. Managing software teams with outsourced distributed components take herding cats to a profoundly higher level – doing it on steroids… or should I say on drugs? How can one survive the ordeal [...]

Offshore Account Manager

Nick Krym — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:40:24 +0000

A few days ago an interesting question came over email – Hi Nick, Thank you for your valuable inputs and keep them coming as usual at your blog..I have been reading your blogs for sometime now and I enjoy reading them as the info provided are very helpful for me.I have recently taken a new role into [...]

Peace in Metrics

Nick Krym — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:31:20 +0000

Agile techniques and approaches are marching across the software land conquering more and more territories. It was not a blitzkrieg forefathers of agile has dreamed of but it is a successful invasion. Along with true agile aficionados with their well thought out and understood processes the crowds of software anarchists disguised as agile [...]

Bidding Sites and Building Frustration

Nick Krym — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:06:30 +0000

A couple weeks ago I put an RFP out for a very specific set of SEO activities on one of bidding sites. This SEO project was for my darling app – WWHOW!. Since WWHOW! is based on user generated content it offers serious SEO challenges. Having spent a few months fighting those [...]

Charting a Map to Disposable Outsourcing

Nick Krym — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:37:50 +0000

Have you heard about PMBOK? In case you did not – the acronym stands for Project Management Body of Knowledge. PMBOK is a very comprehensive document that covers PM processes, procedures, methodologies and techniques promoted by Project Management Institute (PMI), a very well respected organization… A few months ago I asked two PMs on my team [...]

Offshore and Code Review

Nick Krym — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:36:25 +0000

Code review is a rather controversial subject. On one hand many SDLC gurus, tech leads, and architects agree that it could present an incredible value, on the other hand it’s one of the last quality procedures to be exercised in a majority of organizations. There are many reasons code review often takes the [...]

Spam Attack

Nick Krym — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:15:55 +0000

A few weeks ago we went through upgrade of anti-spam software we use in-house. The Bayesian filter database got corrupted during the upgrade or possibly before it and for some reasons we could not restore it from backups. After much ado we decided to start anew. Software upgrade was quite impressive and [...]

Red Flags to Watch Out For

Nick Krym — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:27:02 +0000

How do you know that a relationship with your vendor is going south? Of course if all your partner’s employees just do not show up for work you know that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. That would be somewhat unusual event and probably irreversible. The goal here is to identify early [...]

Offshore Technical Due Diligence

Nick Krym — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:41:06 +0000

A couple years ago I went through a technical due diligence (TDD) of several relatively small offshore vendors. The vendors were providing product development services for one of my clients, the vendors also supported operations of the SaaS for all of the products. The client had fully outsourced s/w product development and support [...]

Laws of Nature

Nick Krym — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:57:20 +0000

I just added a new post to my new blog Common Sense Management – Laws of Nature and the Need for Management. It touches upon one of my favorite metaphors – application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to management and offshore outsourcing (see also Fundamental Laws of Outsourcing). The message common to [...]

Launching Common Sense Management

Nick Krym — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:46:08 +0000

I spent a bit of time cleaning up the Site Map and while doing that I noticed that some of the posts have only loose relevance to outsourcing. I put them in a new category – Common Sense Management (CSM). CSM is not a widely used or a popular term. I started using [...]

Five Steps to Keeping your Vendor

Nick Krym — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:56:29 +0000

I started my earlier post Five Steps to Keeping your Business with comparison of an offshoring engagement to a bad marriage: courting, expensive wedding, honeymoon, initial struggles, mundane irritation, aggravated frustration, and bitter divorce. The post touched upon the most important steps vendors should take to keep their business. Now let me cover the [...]

Data Entry Gig: Execution Control

Nick Krym — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:53:44 +0000

In my earlier post Notes from a Data Entry Gig I covered a few areas related to a small data entry project. There were several areas that were left untouched, one of them – execution control, is worth covering by itself. There are many things you can do to get execution under control on medium [...]

Five Steps to Keeping your Business

Nick Krym — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:57:24 +0000

Offshore teams delivered a significant portion of the products and services for the companies I worked for. My experience in utilizing offshore whether it is measured in years, number of projects or dollars sent offshore is rather substantial. You would think that by now I should have settled on a couple partners who I [...]