Week 13 Geographic Distributed Development

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/rationaledge/admin/current.html

Geographic Distributed Development(GDD) is a mode of software development that the business coordinates project teams located across the regions, countries and time zone.

As the growing of the out-source development from the in-house software development company to the outsider globally, we need to manage not only one company employee, but also the third party as well. We need to solve the conflicts between cultures differences, various languages, various values and conflicts between two companies.

In order to achieve a high quality product, we need to clarify the role of the among different company, or more accurately speaking, the Site, for example, the “Headquarter” only handle all the issues related to the Project and portfolio management, new features development, component, functional and system testing, all build and deployment activities. On the other hand, the “Branch” concern on maintenance coding on the current, client/server version of the application, unit testing of components modified during the maintenance coding, creates and modify requirements for the maintenance phase of the project..

This site shows that how to use RUP to adopt the GDD and with various tools, company can get the software development along with the running of the clock, i.e. 24 hours a day, 7 day-pre-week and reduce time-to-market.

In short: there's a whole lot more to the story of RUP can save time, cut cost, reduce risk, and improve quality on your next GDD project.

IBM Rational tools and assert repositories 

Week 11-Leveraging a global advantage

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/04/18/16dyndev_1.html?s=feature

In fact, if all the software develop are developing with the RIP methodology, everything should be alright. The global software developer can get the advantage from it since the detail divide of the working force among the developers all around the world: under the XP, pair programming works as the American developer are sleeping, the Asia developer works on the code-review, testing or code re-factoring. From the point of my view, many software vendor would to work as a business: they use a lot of methodology and management technique to manage group of the developers. As the result, they are all working writing documents and paper, instead of creating a good intelligent property, in order to figure the best solution for the customers.

Open-source software, well, they are created by a group of volunteer developer around the world. Developers seldom bounded by these paper work. As the result, the quality of the software is extremely good but no one would use the MySQL to replace the Oracle. What’s the reason? Undoubtedly, Oracle provide a lot of “evidence” to show their products are really works and reliable but throwing several tones of paper and documents to show that, but not the MySQL.

In my point of view, RUP and XP are the tools to management a group of developers in the software vendors, not for the purpose to creating a good/extremely good software sadly.

RUP iteration graph. 

Week 10 RUP and XP

http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/RUPvsXP.pdf

Needs of the developer and customer

We have mentioned a lot what do the software engineers need to figure out what to do and what do not do under the Rational Unified Process, so we may think about what the NEEDS of the developer and the needs of the clients.

When comparing with the Extreme Programming, RUP provide more guidelines for a group of developer to build software in a disciplined, elegant and productive way in the limited time. Although XP is fast and fewer set of rules to follow, it is difficult to follow when developers are going to build a reliable and systematic, real-time, bug-free software.

In person, I would prefer XP since less documentations and rules means developers have more room to focus on the project coding, not in the planning stage. A workable software still better than a good written documentation but fairly acceptable software.