The Challenges of Managing a Global Software Engineering Capability: Theory to Practice

The emergence of "off shoring or outsourcing" in the debate about where best to do software development and applications support has added yet another layer of complexity into the domain of development managers. This is on top of the usual plethora of issues we all know and love such as configuration and requirements management, design, enhancements, reuse and refactoring, baseline controls, IP protection, technology issues, standards, testing, porting and distribution, support and maintenance. All these make the practice of managing a global software engineering capability especially interesting. The various commentaries on good software engineering practice are often about what to do on single projects in serial environments to manage the risks associated with the various issues raised above. In Mincom's commercial environment there exists the added challenge of the need for integration of a range of different but concurrent projects together with the complexity of managing the delivery of this capability globally. The competition for resources together with skills matching ensures a number of management challenges. This presentation addresses some of the techniques used to; enforce standards without stifling innovation, improve software quality without imposing zealous quality overheads, compare and contrast outsourcing options. Some observations on the use of agile methods are given as well as an impact analysis of resource balancing.