SCM: Keeping your teams in sync
Could geographically dispersed teams work as effectively as those who are housed under one roof? How do you keep the team seamlessly in sync?
When finding software development talents had gone across the globe in recent years, the next big challenge for team managers had been how to keep the team seamlessly in sync.
Could geographically dispersed teams work as effectively as those who are housed under one roof? What are the special challenges that come with distance?
Damon Poole, Founder and CTO of AccuRev Inc, says geographically dispersed teams have made a dramatic impact on how things are being done at present. “When you have an external team, any process issues that you have are magnified until you fix them.”
Distance, he says, can be narrowed when you have the right outsourcing team and the management on both sides which has experience with the special challenges that come with distance.
The biggest area of focus, Poole says, is keeping your internal and external teams in sync. “That means keeping in constant contact about plans, progress, status, and expectations,” he adds, “and being candid in both directions.” Moreover, he says, the challenge lies on finding and fixing any process problems that come about when you scale out your team.
Poole emphasizes that to keep your teams in sync also means keeping your work products in sync; that is, your project tasks and your source codes.
Location is a non-issue
Good fortune that software configuration management (SCM) is able to make all these synchronization possible, as interactions within the team in relation to the software development process is facilitated.
“There is a lot of benefit in using the same source control and issue tracking tools and making sure that they work well in a distributed environment,” Poole says of SCM as one of the most important tools development companies must have especially in cases where teams are geographically dispersed.
For example, AccuRev’s SCM solution is “architected to solve the problems associated with today’s complex and changing software development environments. Its interface improves collaboration, visibility and management of multiple releases developed in parallel for geographically distributed or outsourced teams to remain agile and competitive.”
AccuRev’s SCM is a highly visual and dynamic GUI, enabling companies to manage its process and source code assets together, regardless of location.
Email This Article
Print This Article
