Many clients look to software outsourcing as a way to get a better bang for their buck. Because of price differentials between global economies, this is clearly one of the advantages of offshoring IT services. However, there are probably tens of thousands of companies globally whose prices will beat your local market rates (specially if you are loc...

Many IT managers resist the temptation of going agile (which implies working under a time and materials model) because they believe their managers, or their purchasing department, or whoever approves a budgetary expenditure, will not easily approve a T & M project. It is easy to see that for someone who has not been directly involved with the c...

Over the past couple of years I've had the opportunity to facilitate retrospectives for several software development teams within PSL and gained some insights and lessons learned that I would like to share. One of the most common issues for the teams which I've facilitated retrospectives is that they did not schedule retrospective activities as par...

​ When shopping around for vendors for a software development project, clients that are not familiar with agile methodologies want a figure to assign to their budget or have a specific figure themselves that came from a previously defined budget. These numbers often come way before any detailed requirements have been documented and most certainly t...

In the first part of this article we reviewed the concept of Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) and outlined five key variables that determine the TCO for software development projects: Process, Quality, Risk, Productivity and Cost. Each of these variables is critical to keep in mind when selecting a nearshoring or offshori...

​ When outsourcing software development projects , comparing vendors with different price points can be very difficult. We propose variables that should be taken into account when deciding which vendor is most likely to produce the lowest Total Cost of Ownership for an offshoring or nearshoring development project. We also evidence why we beli...

​ Your relationship with an outsourcing software vendor might be one of the most important ones when they work on key projects or technologies for your company. Nurturing a good relationship is never a static formula as all projects and relationships vary greatly. However, during our 30 years' experience in the software development industry working...

​ This is Part 6 of the series of articles "Why go Agile?" When first introduced to Agile, clients often react with phrases like "ok, from a technical perspective this makes sense, but how do I sell this to my CEO?" PSL believes Agile methodologies should be seen under a stage-gate scenario, where commitments to continue a software development proj...