Global Development Platform
Although global process frameworks provide teams with the right direction, they fall short in helping with the day-to-day challenges involved in delivery. Gaps in communication, coordination, and synchronization are a natural consequence of GDD and your goal is to minimize these gaps. The GDD platform available to you can make a significant difference in the risk, overhead, and level of complexity involved in dealing with these gaps.
It's important to recognize the overhead and risks introduced in GDD early, and establish an effective strategy and platform to address them before you get too deep. If you don't provide a platform for GDD, project teams will find tactical and "best fit" project solutions as they deal with the complexities of delivery. These "best fit" solutions are usually reinvented on a project-by-project (or project manager-by-project manager) basis. As the scope and scale of GDD initiatives increase, project managers and technical architects will find that they have a harder time finding "best fit" project solutions that provide success with confidence. The net effect is that the risk of success for GDD increases as does the overhead required for managing it.
This isn't a call to establish a platform that contains more than you need before you get started with GDD. What it means is that you should establish a GDD platform for your organization that aligns with your GDD plans and future IT strategy early in your adoption. Your GDD platform should provide the organization with unified support and the ability to selectively adapt with the varying needs of your GDD projects.
The need for lifecycle visibility and collaboration increases significantly with GDD. A common approach for GDD projects is to functionally divide work so that distributed teams can complete their activities individually. For example, a company may do all of its analysis, design, and release management in the U.S., while working with teams in India for development and testing. Although their work has been divided functionally, it is still critically interdependent. Since real-time collaboration between these distributed teams is limited, they frequently have to collaborate passively with each other. This involves accessing and leveraging the related work and activities of their peers in an agreed upon manner within the context of their work activity. Coordination, synchronization, and communication become critical because any questions or answers that can't be resolved independently result in delays or "best guess" answers for work to proceed. When an effective GDD platform is not instituted, GDD project members must figure out how to maintain coordination, synchronization, and communication themselves. On these projects, delays and rework are frequently encountered enemies as well as greater complexity and overhead.
It is important to remember that distributed teams that are not a part of the project owner's organization need equal or greater access and support to the GDD platform. Offshore teams commonly don't have the benefit of actively participating in the highly collaborative requirements, analysis, and design activities. Therefore, they have a greater reliance on the GDD platform as a means for communication. The GDD platform must also be effectively utilized by stakeholders involved in analysis, design, and other collaborative disciplines and activities. Frequently, teams that perform these activities will use informal channels of collaboration and communication outside of the GDD platform, excluding distributed teams from the interaction. There may be a belief that the interaction or story can be "retold" in the form of specifications, models, and the like. While important for keeping teams focused on project goals, these are not replacements for the context provided by direct observance and participation.
Commercial examples of GDD platforms include the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform (www.ibm.com/developerworks/platform) and Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System (msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem). Along with others, these are transforming into "collaborative development environments" and are poised to revolutionize today's GDD platforms. IBM Rational's Jazz project (www.jazz.net) is one example. Organizations may also consider implementing a multi-vendor global development platform by selecting best-of-breed tools and technologies for software disciplines and leveraging their integration support. However, it is important to select a platform that tightly couples the software development activities and work products of your GDD team across the lifecycle while providing the flexibility and support to free your team members to work as they normally do.
Ultimately, the best GDD platform improves the cohesiveness of your GDD project teams from beginning to end and makes working globally and organizationally distributed as close as possible to working locally as a single unit.
