Certified Scrum Master Stephen Forte will be presenting a half day seminar on Agile Development, Tools and Teams on Wednesday February 24th at the MCCIA in Pune. The event is brought to you free by e-Zest, MCCIA, and Telerik. Seats are limited, to sign up in advance, please email seminar@e-zest.net.

The Program Details

One of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, Scrum is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like: project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen (a certified Scrum Master) shows many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and an off-shoring environment. We’ll then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile development, including planning poker, unit testing, and much more. There will be plenty of time for Question and Answer. This seminar is a jump start for a certified scrum master exam. 

Who Should Attend 

Developers and development managers, especially those using the Microsoft .NET platform. 

Schedule and Agenda

Seminar Coverage	Time Slot
Event Registration	9:00-9:55
Speaker Introduction	9:55-10:00
Introduction to Agile Development and Scrum	10:00-11:00
Agile Estimation	11:00-11:30
High Tea Break	11:30-11:45
Implementing Scrum with remote and offshore teams	11:45-12:15
Agile Tools, Test Driven Development, and Continuous Integration	12:15-12:45
Summary, Question and Answer	12:45-1:00
Conclusion of Program	1:00

 

The Speaker

Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, a leading vendor in .NET components. He sits on the board of several start-ups including Triton Works and is also a certified scrum master. Prior he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Corzen, Inc, a New York based provider of online market research data for Wall Street Firms. Corzen was acquired by Wanted Technologies (TXV: WAN) in 2007. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 (MS Press). Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City and also was co-founder of the New York based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group. He currently is an MVP, INETA speaker and is the co-moderator and founder of the NYC .NET Developer User Group. Stephen has an MBA from the City University of New York. Stephen currently lives in Hong Kong and will be returning to Mt. Everest again in September 2010. 

Final Details

DATE	Wednesday February 24th, 2010
TIMING	9.00 am to 1.00 pm (registration from 9.00 a.m. to 9.45 a.m.)
VENUE	Shekhar Natu Hall, MCCIA, 403-A,Senapati Bapat Road, Pune 411 016
FEE	Free

 

 

 

Society of Information Management’s (SIM) 2008 IT Trends Survey shows different picture than prevailing perception about IT outsourcing. The data shows that US companies are not laying off IT staff and shipping jobs overseas to cut IT budgets. “There are more jobs than there are qualified people”, said Jerry Luftman, an IT professor and the SIM director.

The common perception about offshore outsourcing is built by two things (i) media exaggerating IT offshoring and (ii) prominent and large companies outsourcing much of their consumer support to offshore companies.

The recent research conducted showed that offshore outsourced staff budget is just 5.2% of overall IT budget allocation for 2009. This is higher than last two years’ figures: 4% and 3.2%. In the catastrophic period of global slowdown such increase is a pleasant breeze for offshore IT services companies. The scarcity of qualified candidates in the labor market may be the reason for companies thinking to outsourcing their IT work. This outsourcing is still a very small fraction. The bigger threat to US IT sector is labor crunch issue which is going to become more acute with the impending retirement of Baby Boomers and the smaller-than-needed numbers of math and science students that are graduating and looking for IT jobs.

The offshore outsourced staff budget (5.2%) is much lower than 33.7% budget allocated to internal staff. It is still smaller than 6.2% pie allocated for dedicated domestic outsourcing. In 2009 offshore outsource staff budget has got increased as compared to previous years. Along with that budget for dedicated domestic outsourcing has got increased in 2009. In reality, US is creating more jobs for local candidates than previous years in IT sector.

The activities that SIM does to increase awareness of IT as a viable profession and maturing college IT programs may address problem of IT professionals availability but the big thing is that it is changing or will eventually change the perception about offshore outsourcing.

Interesting  post from Gordon Ritter founder of Emergence Capital Partners on future of Software as a Service(SaaS) on Venturebeat.   

When I was reading quickly through RSS feeds on offshore software development I came across a list. This list mentioned several points when company thinks of or outsources their software development activity. Almost all the points got covered there.

Pondering over that for a while a question stroke me 'Why companies outsourcing heavily to India than other countries in the world?'. Is that simply because India has good ratio of English speaking population per thousand graduates? Or is it because they are technically competent? Both reasons are mostly true. With this fact getting published in every third article on offshore software development other countries got bombarded with a thought that they need to score well on English and Technical competence. And they have started doing well and have started fighting with India for their share in outsourcing pie.

Coming back again to list leaving this thought I realised that the list was about only when company thinks or outsources. That list has nothing mentioned to whom to company should outsource. The another next very important thing that company should take into account while selecting their outsourcing vendor is domain knowledge. This is the field where India need to improve. A quote from Mr. MrinalaSingh flashed my memory. He says, "In fact a recent observation mentioned that this is a concern not only for small corporations but also for vary large system integrators, where an area on which India based services firm lack is in lack of domain knowledge."

I think our clients are fortunate to outsource their activities to e-Zest because here we put a lot of efforts in domain understanding rather than just converting their requirements in 010101 binary codes through some high level language.

Domain knowledge is something that e-Zest has and India lacks. But Indian IT industry is doing fair in acquiring it. After all, as an international industry it has to stand the competition. All the best for Indian IT!