Continuous improvement through iterative development in a multi-geography environment

Abstract

With a very short time frame in mind we were commissioned to build a service solution that encompassed over 430 requirements. Given expertise, skills, time and budget constraints we had to search for resources around the world and assembled a team of more than 40 people in 7 locations across 6 different time zones. We chose state of the art architecture and development paradigms such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and iterative development to facilitate the service capabilities between components and teams and to continuously refine our approach from iteration to iteration. In this paper we identify some of the challenges we faced and describe how we addressed them in sub-sequent iterations. The aggregate of our improvements constitutes a set of best practices that we recommend for future engagements of this type and suggestions for new tooling to support these activities. © 2008 IEEE.