How NOT to fail your NAV offshore development?
Many a
times we require some helping hands to complete a project on time.
Sometimes it is only for short term and sometimes it is due to a large project
where we need to scale up the team really fast. This is where we think about
getting the development done with the offshore development team. Cost is of
course another factor as we want to increase the project profitability.
Have you
ever worked on such project where the development team is sitting miles away?
How was it working on such projects? Was it always as smooth experience as with
the onsite development team. I have been part of many offshore development
projects and have seen some of the deliveries going through a lot of pain. On the
other hand, many of the deliveries were so smooth that the testing team faced
difficulty in finding even a single defect. So, what should be kept in mind to
ensure the successful and smooth off-shore development experience.
Most common Issues faced in Off-shore Development -
Frequent change in requirements and designs resulting in a lot of rework and sometimes leads to conflict between onsite and offshore team
The development team is not able to move further due to the input required from onsite team
Just before the delivery date, you get the surprise that the work is not complete
The customization done by the developer are not as per the best practices
Documentation / In-Line comments are missing. The onsite development team is not able to figure out the customized code
Customization done by development team has a lot of defects
The developer has not tested his development before sending
The objects released by the development teams are from different base and creating a lot of confusion
What should NOT be done?
1. Assume anything
“Assumptions are killers” is what I learnt by working on the multiple
development projects. Please be specific as much as possible while preparing
the technical design document. The technical design document should cover the field
level details to be created in case of a Table / Field creation. The Functional
Design should also provide the test scenarios to be tested.
2. Starting without freezing the scope
This is one of the biggest reason why the offshore development
go-through a lot of pain. Not freezing the scope / requirements results in a
lot of rework and affect the quality of the development. So, let’s not send an
incomplete Technical / Functional design to the offshore development team.
3. Delegate and forget
Don’t just handover the Technical Design and forget about the
development until the release date. You need to monitor the progress on
day-to-day basis otherwise you might get unpleasant surprise just before
release.
4. Outsourcing tasks other than
development
This is my suggestion when you start a project with a new team, you should outsource only the development work. The
tasks apart from development for e.g. Functional Design and Technical Design
requires a close coordination with Solution Architect and the client hence it
is better to do them onsite.
You might outsource technical designs later if the person has been on
the project for more than 6 months or so as he will be very much comfortable with the development process and functional process flow.
What should be done?
1. Agreeing on the Standards / Development
Process to be followed
a. Communicate the Best Practices,
Commenting / In-Line Documentation standard for MS Dynamics NAV
b. Finalize the development process and
the documentation required
2. How should the development
environment be setup?
a. Create a development environment to
be used by the Off-shore development team
b. Setup a Source Code Management
software like GitHub or TFS. The NAV Objects can be exported in txt format and stored on GitHub or TFS.
c. The Offshore development team should
put their changes on TFS / GitHub
d. The onsite development team should
pick the changes from TFS and put it on onsite Testing Environment
3. How to handover the requirement to the developer?
a. Share the Functional Design,
Technical Design and Test Scenarios with the development team to study
b. Development team should go-through
the document and prepare the list of their queries
c. Arrange a walk-through session with
the Functional Designer, Technical Designer and the development team to discuss
these queries
4. How to ensure the Development is going in right direction?
a. Daily Skype Meeting - Arrange a
daily skype meeting with the development lead for discussing the progress and challenges
b. Peer Review - After the development,
the off-shore development team should do the Peer Review to ensure that the
standards / best practices have been followed. The reviews feedback should be
documented in Peer Review Log
c. Random Code Review – The onsite Development Lead should do the random code reviews to ensure the quality of the deliveries.
d. The Developer should prepare the Release
note with Unit Test Evidence. This helps to ensure that the developer has done the unit testing before releasing it for testing.
5. How to handover the development to onsite team for the testing?
a. The developer should check-in his
changes to the Git-Hub / TFS
b. He should prepare the Release note
with Unit Test Evidence with the scenarios tested
6. Sharing the Testing Feedback and tracking the process?
a. If we have the Incident Management
System, nothing like it otherwise the Issue Tracker in excel must be created.
There should not be one email for each incident. Complete the testing and put
it in Issue Tracker and share with the off-shore development team
b. The offshore development team should
update the status with the action taken
7. Team composition and responsibilities (In the context of offshore Development) -
Onsite
|
·
Solution Architect
|
-
Responsible for overall solution design on macro level
|
·
Functional Designer
|
-
Responsible for providing Functional Design for the Gaps
-
Testing the release and maintaining Issue Tracker
|
·
Development Lead
|
-
Preparing Development and Testing Environment
-
Finalizing the Coding Standard, Best Practices, Commenting Formats
-
Responsible for providing Technical Design for the Gaps
-
Answer queries raised by the off-shore development team
-
Conducting random Code Review
-
Deploying the changes from TFS to Test Environment
|
Off-shore
|
·
Offshore Development Lead
|
-
Track overall progress of Development and the quality of work
-
Ensure that the Development Standard set are being followed
-
Participate in daily scrum for the development progress
-
Helping / guiding the offshore development team with design or
development issues
-
Peer Reviews
-
Release Notes Preparation
|
·
Developers
|
-
Study Technical Design and prepare the queries
-
Development
-
Peer Reviews
-
Unit Testing
-
Unit Test Evidence Preparation
-
Check-In the changes to TFS
|
8. Documents to be prepared -
