Nas Raja
Business-aware Technology Leadership
Solving Business Problems with Effective IT Implementation
Value Proposition
I rejuvenate both software services as well as product building efforts with process improvement, effective program management, high quality team building and keen mentoring that produces tangible results.
Software Development Lifecycle
Every significant software project requires a deliberate development process. Haphazardly run projects exceed budgets, go beyond deadlines, suffer from quality issues or simply fail to meet the end-user requirements or some combination there-of. Historically, software development processes can be roughly divided into design focused processes and testing focused processes. Rational Unified Process would be an example of the former and Agile methodologies would be an example of the later. Design-oriented processes focus on up-front investment of time into analysis and design to ensure the right product is built, whereas testing-focused processes concentrate on extensive testing of developed functionality to ensure that the product functions correctly. These are two different goals and stressing on one of them can lead to making compromises with the other.
The software development process that I preach to my teams tries to combine the best of both worlds by emphasizing design and testing to an about equal degree. The defining characteristics of my favored development process, what I call the Balanced, Iterative, Artifact-focused Quality Development Paradigm or BITQOP for short, has the following defining characteristics:
A watered-down version of BITQOP is as follows:
A subset of BITQOP is the Continuous Quality Improvement paradigm or CQI for short. CQI is a model for assuring quality of produced software - particularly with-in the context of an outsourcing development setup. Software development with remote teams has its unique set of quality challenges and CQI aims to address these.
Are you running a software development project that could use some help in getting its act together? If so, drop me a line at nas@nasraja.com and I will be happy to share my thoughts; development process improvement is an area that I am passionately interested in!