Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Insight
A distributed software development (DSD) strategy is only suitable for very large projects: true or false? In DSD projects, you cannot mix software development with hardware development: true or false? Companies cannot apply DSD to all of their projects -- it is just too difficult to manage: true or false?
Yes -- it appears to be true. Companies are satisfied with their strategic choice of distributed software development (DSD). The tough challenges of DSD bear sweet fruit at the end of the road -- at least that is what many development organizations have indicated in a Cutter Consortium survey on DSD. In this, the third and final in a series of articles on DSD, we will report on problems that organizations encounter, how they resolve them, and how satisfied they are with their DSD strategy.
Recently I chanced to meet a gentleman on a plane who audits the software used in medical and pharmaceutical instruments. During our long and interesting conversation, he cited several instances in which defects in software had resulted in deaths.
I'm an employee of Workshare Technology, and we've been doing Extreme Programming (XP) in our R&D department for about a year and a half now. It seemed like a natural thing to do -- we want to produce quality code, and XP presented itself as a way of improving the quality of the code we produced.
I've introduced Scrum 1 into a wide range of companies and development projects over the past eight years. When I was asked to write this article, I reflected on why some implementations have proven successful and others failed.