The Risk-free Outsourcing Solution 4 Fatal Risks in Enterprise Mobile Applications and How to Avoid Them

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1 The Risk-free Outsourcing Solution 4 Fatal Risks in Enterprise Mobile Applications and How to Avoid Them By Brian Gee

2 Background Mobile software is the hot topic in most enterprises, and for good reasons. Employees are demanding access to corporate data in the same way they access consumer data from the Internet. In order to meet this demand, many companies that lack the time or resources to develop mobile applications are turning to outsourced development vendors. Outsourcing presents a number of opportunities and challenges. A recent survey of software executives highlights key problem areas in software outsourcing. 57% stated that their outsourcing vendor failed to meet business expectations 54% reported that their outsourcing vendor failed to meet financial expectations 57% of survey respondents indicated that their outsourcing vendor relationship resulted in zero or negative productivity Many customers have been attracted to the economic efficiencies of outsourcing and explored ways to broaden their outsourcing footprint. Application globalization, testing and lower level software development support tasks have become core elements in the typical outsourcing capabilities mix. As more complex projects entered the mix, outsourcing problems and client dissatisfaction have grown. More recently, mobile software development has been added to the outsourcing mix. It is at this level of software development where the fundamental limitations of traditional outsourcers are most evident. Typical firms have not succeeded in applying proper processes, methodologies, and technologies to ensure successful mobile software product development outsourcing. Mobile enterprise application development requires expertise and development competency in 5 unique, interdependent areas: Area 1: Power management A mobile application will run on a mobile device with limited computing power and storage, and constrained battery life. Because of this, it should be efficient. Battery life is one reason you might want to optimize your app even if it already seems to run "fast enough". Battery life is important to users, and user will know if your application is responsible for draining their battery. Area 2: Seamless interaction with enterprise systems Certain design decisions can still cause problems for users because of unplanned interactions with other applications or dialogs, inadvertent loss of data, unintended blocking, and so on. To avoid these problems, it helps to understand the context in which your applications run and the system interactions that can affect your application. In short, you should strive to develop an application that interacts seamlessly with the system and with other applications. Area 3: Responsiveness There is one aspect of an application that will send users in a fiery rage when they try to use the application. These are the applications that aren't responsive enough the ones that feel sluggish, hang or freeze for significant periods, or take too long to process input. Area 4: Compatibility across devices and screen sizes Mobile software must be designed to run on many different types of devices. For developers, the range and number of devices creates a huge potential issue what will you support?

3 Area 5: Unique User interface issues Mobile applications need a wide variety of icons, dialogs, tabs, status bars, and lists. You must specify icon size, color, shading, and other details for making all your icons fit in the mobile system. Often, a widget can display an application's most important or timely information at a glance, on a user's Home screen. Mobile applications differ in how they make use of Option menus and Context menus that enable users to perform operations and navigate to other parts of your application or to other applications As you design your application's UI and feature set, you are free to re-use activities from other applications as if they were yours, to enrich and extend your application. Guidelines are required to describe important underlying principles and mechanisms, such as multitasking, activity reuse, intents, the activity stack, and tasks. Why mobile software development is so risky Clearly, mobile application development is complex and highly interdependent. Developers are forced to work with new, unfamiliar and sometimes fragile technology. Careful planning and orchestration are the keys to success. Software product development executives commonly cite 4 factors that seriously limit software outsourcing effectiveness: 1. Ineffective communications 2. Poor project management 3. Steep learning curves 4. Inferior product quality This whitepaper explores these risks and proven methods to mitigate the risks. Practical advice, current best practices, and real world situations are explored. A summary checklist identifies all key steps and milestones in properly planning an outsourcing vendor selection and management process to avoid the 4 fatal flaws in mobile software development outsourcing. The 4 fatal risks Risk 1: Ineffective Communication Early outsourced projects such as 2K projects rarely required significant coordination between offshore and client teams. Thus, traditional outsourcing firms never developed codified processes to ensure efficient communications. Misunderstandings come in many forms including differences in work practices, norms, and an inability of the offshore team to understand nuances associated with the client s product functionality. When interviewed, software executives repeatedly cite the costly burdens associated with unsuccessful communication of product functionality to outsourcing teams, despite heavy requirements and specification documentation. Several software executives wrote, in response to the question, What was the biggest surprise you experienced with your global development initiative? The amount of overhead and planning required for minimal return The amount of management & follow-up required to explain the simplest and most obvious of features and functionality Misinterpretation of documents, communication, and cultural differences, in spite of us having everything laid out in detail for the outsource team The problems created by language and cultural barriers include:

4 Incomplete features and functionality Significant overhead devoted to over-documentation Lost productivity and wasted development cycles Poor project ROI When developer discretion becomes part of the outsourcing equation, the benefits of outsourcing software development can quickly evaporate due to cultural and communications barriers. Risk 2: Poor Project Management Current outsourcing models focus the responsibility for coordination and daily project management of offshore teams squarely on the client s shoulders. Even with significant client involvement, the lack of codified project management protocols on the offshore team often creates long project delays. The geographic and cultural distance between teams also results in longer than expected lead times in planning work and responding to issues when they arise. A simple issue that can be resolved in one face-to-face meeting may often require 3 or 4 electronic communications in a globally distributed team environment. This then results in days of delay, as team members work to coordinate time zone and working norm issues. Several software executives wrote of poor project management from their outsourcing vendors: They insisted on building what they wanted, not what the requirements said Total lack of commitment to meet project schedules progress reports always indicated everything was on schedule but deliverables were always months behind The infrastructure required of us all on our side to support an offshore engagement was very expensive. This included process, management, controls, etc., because the outsourcers didn t have any of it in place The problems created by poor project management include: Lack of visibility, resulting in reactive versus proactive problem solving Little or no schedule predictability Lost productivity and wasted development cycles Poor project ROI Risk 3: Steep Learning Curve With traditional outsourcing firms, their offshore resources are often ill-prepared to learn and productively engage the client business, technologies, and processes. This often results in significant hidden costs of training, overseeing, and backfilling for unproductive offshore resources. In describing their outsourcing firms productivity levels, several executives wrote: Extremely inefficient - took them 9 months with 14 people to complete what took us 3 months with 4 people The biggest disappointment we experienced was how much management and follow-up was required to train the offshore group Their productivity was not as high as our domestic team s, which resulted in higher than expected cost escalation

5 Some factors at work in traditional outsourcing firms that drive learning curve-related costs / risks are: Larger inexperienced team vs. smaller experienced team: when faced with limited subject matter expertise, many outsourcers will add headcount. This creates a higher aggregate cost of learning and more points of execution risk Team turnover: the team will experience turnover when employees leave the company and when employees are rotated into new projects. The learning curve must be traversed each time a team member is replaced The problems caused by this inability to climb steep learning curves include: High defect injection rates Software performance and scalability problems Schedule visibility and delivery risk Unexpected need for top client management involvement Poor project ROI Risk 4: Inferior Product Quality Traditional outsourcing firms commonly lack the resources and experience needed to meet modern software quality expectations. Quality assurance standards, practices, and project management tools common in the U.S. are not supported in any consistent way in traditional outsourcing even within the same outsourcing vendor. When interviewed about quality of software delivered by their outsourcing vendors, executives responded with: Extremely poor quality we had to essentially do the entire work over The software met the functional requirements, but when it came under load, it broke We stopped outsourcing due to low quality and lower customer satisfaction The problems caused by lack of quality in outsourcing include: Higher defect density Inability to meet performance and load requirements Deteriorating end customer satisfaction due to scalability issues How to overcome the 4 fatal risks Can these risks be eliminated? In practice, yes. But some work is involved. Much of it comes down to choosing the right outsourcing vendor and ensuring that the project is organized for success. There are a number of details (summarized in the following section) that must be considered in vendor selection due diligence, but the most common elements fall into these 3 areas: 1. Engagement Management: The active presence of outsourcer sponsored management at the client site ensures a critical point of outcome ownership that is missing from traditional outsourcing.

6 2. Project Technology Solution: A solution that codifies and ensures 100% adherence to efficient outsourcing processes should be considered a baseline requirement for every software development project. 3. Team Structure and Development: Insist on smaller, experienced, low-turnover developer teams with demonstrated success. Specific details of Management and Project Technology requirements are explained in the following discussions. How to overcome Risk 1: Ineffective Communication 1. The outsourcing firm should staff every project with an Engagement Manager. The Engagement Manager must ensure that all requirements and specifications are accurately captured and documented, such that nothing is lost in translation between the client and the outsourcing team. The Engagement Manager will interact with the client engineering team on a daily basis, internalize all product nuances, and then translate that information back to updated requirements and work plan - in a timely, actionable manner for the offshore team. All specifications and work planning is conducted during the client workday, ensuring the client team is not hampered by time zone issues, nor any lost cycles. 2. The technology solution should force all team members to strictly adhere to a welldefined process such that a. Specifications and requirements are centralized and faithfully updated by the Engagement Manager b. Specifications and requirements are syndicated between client and offshore teams for updates, questions, commentary, and approval, ensuring that the offshore team truly understands product nuances c. Allows full visibility and traceability in development and testing, so that the specification, development and test status of all requirements is clearly understood at all times The Engagement Manager and the technology solution, in tandem, serve as the bridge between client and offshore engineering teams, thereby ensuring that there are no problems with: Incomplete features and functionality Significant overhead devoted to over-documentation Lost productivity and wasted development cycles How to overcome Risk 2: Poor Project Management 1. The Engagement Manager should serve in a dual-capacity, as a techno-functional resource. As a techno-functional resource, the Engagement Manager is better equipped to properly project manage the engagement, structure the work for the offshore team in such a way as to maximize the team s productivity, and provide the client team with strong, proactive project management 2. The technology solution should provide 100%, real-time visibility into the project, ondemand, thereby ensuring a. A reliable way to trace development effort to specific requirements b. A clear breakdown of all engineering effort, with granularity from release level to feature backlog to user story to task-by-engineer level c. Real-time progress against planned progress, enabling real-time decision-making

7 d. Dashboards that identify, flag, and initiate action against results that represent significant variances to plan With an Engagement Manager and offshore team trained to use the technology solution, the client now has a means to monitor progress real-time, and ensure immediate course correction and proactive project management and issue identification and mitigation by the vendor, solving: Lack of visibility, resulting in reactive versus proactive problem solving Poor schedule predictability Lost productivity and wasted development cycles How to overcome Risk 3: Steep Learning Curve 1. The Engagement Manager serves as the primary source of product information for the offshore team. The Engagement Manager must have technical skills and insights matched to client development capabilities - and must be able to translate high level client requirements into clear, consistent work plans across the team. The Engagement Manager constantly drives a structured knowledge transfer process to ensure that the offshore team understands all requirements, as the requirements are updated or refined 2. The technology solution should help developers learn the operation and structure of existing code. Developers must be able to: a. Easily and quickly familiarize themselves with the architecture and conventions of client code b. Quickly locate code relevant components from client repositories c. Identify code interdependencies and perform accurate impact analysis across the entirety of the complex code base d. Collaborate effectively over the code base Traditional outsourcing relies on a trial and error learning curve process. With an Engagement Manager and a technology solution, the offshore team should be able to become productive on the client s product immediately. Vendors should provide a technology solution that incorporates the code search into an overall workflow - to bring the offshore team up-to-speed quickly, and ensure the team develops a strong familiarity with relevant existing code. With proper technology, the outsource team can: Achieve low defect injection rates Coordinate code changes Build more maintainable code Minimize schedule risk Achieve project ROI targets How to overcome Risk 4: Inferior Product Quality 1. The Engagement Manager should coordinate and oversee all QA activities, and ensure that all project planning properly incorporates testing activities that cover the full scope of functionality and code. 2. The technology solution should provide a. A mechanism that ensures continuous test coverage visibility b. An unambiguous way to dynamically map requirements into an actionable / measurable test plan

8 c. Dashboards that identify, flag, and initiate action against results that represent significant variances to plan This combination of Engagement Manager and technology solution is the only reliable means by which to capture and act upon key QA metrics such as: Defect arrival trend Defect removal trend Efforts spent per defect fixing Escaped defects Validity of defects found Rate of finding defects Rate of authoring test cases Rate of automating test cases Release readiness Test coverage Planned vs. actual covered test cases With the Engagement Manager and technology solution, the project can overcome: Higher defect density Inability to meet performance and load requirements Deteriorating end customer satisfaction due to scalability issues

9 Summary Vendor Selection Criteria The list on the following page identifies project management, staffing and developer tooling considerations that should be included in the selection for a software outsourcing vendor. Include this list in Vendor due diligence and qualification. Risk 1 Communication Risk 2 Project Mgmt Risk 3 Learning Curve Risk 4 Quality Engagement Management Continuous interaction with Client Continuous requirement update Ongoing, planned client reviews Structures offshore efforts Owns key milestones, quality Project Technology Centralized requirements Collaboration Traceability: requirements dev QA Work breakdown / accountability Real-time progress / mgmt dashboard Variance notification Learn / locate / leverage existing code Impact analysis Defect tracking & trending Automated testing & test coverage Readiness / delivery metrics Team Structure Relevant domain experience Vendor turnover rate<10% Team rotation rate <5% All work in Project Technology (above)

10 About Aragon Aragon is the lowest risk option for mobile software outsourcing. Aragon s clients are worldwide innovators spanning from Fortune 500 enterprises such as Oracle to well-financed startups. Aragon provides next generation technology-centric business solutions services with a client focused process and methodology. Aragon s success is due to their unwavering obligation to our principle that a commitment made is a commitment kept. ACG follows five key principles: We create solutions at quality, cost, and efficiency far higher than what companies can create themselves. Aragon has a responsibility to their employees to provide a work place which is fair, fun, and family oriented. They are continuously ahead of the technology curve, reinventing every process on every engagement and continuously competing with themselves. They provide predictable performance and growth in valuation to their shareholders and are good corporate citizens to the community in which they operate, investing a portion of our profits back into their communities. Founded in 2005 by a group of experienced professionals from top-tier strategy and IT consulting firms, Aragon maintains strong ties to the Chinese software engineering community where it recruits top talent. Aragon specializes in very complex, cutting-edge development, using agile methodology. As a firm, Aragon focuses on providing clients with a very strong product and project management capabilities, and coupling that with the cost and talent advantages of offshoring software development and I.T. delivery. Sources Project Management with IBM Rational Unified Process: Lessons from the Trenches: Introduction to Outsourcing a Major Software Development Project, September Cutter Consortium, IT Offshore Outsourcing: The Elephant in the Room, SIIA Global Software Development Survey Report, December 2006.