It's Been a Fascinating 5-Year Journey for SoftTechnics So Far

It's been a fascinating 5-year journey for SoftTechnics so far. A journey of growth and strive to leadership positions in mobile web applications and games development as well as IT teams extension services. There were ups and downs, bumps and small victories that the company lived through, survived and got only stronger. In course of these five years SoftTechnics kept laying the foundation for its further success and future victories. 

Today, 5 years after SoftTechnics appeared on the market, our focus is primarily on offshore development services that we provide based on principles of agility. Collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams is at heart of agile development, which aims at building fast and flexible change in organizations. There are heated debates in the world of IT whether outsourcing can be agile. A 2012 Forrester report, for instance, argues that offshore agile development is rather an oxymoron and can never function properly while it only adds complexity to implementing projects. 

In course of these 5 years we created our know-hows in offshore development, built our reputation and clientele, identified what we do best and narrowed our scope of work to fully concentrate and become leaders in what we do.

Though the wide-spread belief is that in order to be agile, teams have to be in the same room, today the view is evolving into the fact that software development is best produced with agile methods, regardless of location (Overby 2012) and SoftTechnics, being an offshore innovative US IT company realizes the value and potential of true agile development and in its day-to-day takes IT best practices into account. 

One of the biggest challenges in offshore agile development is poor communication or lack of it. At SoftTechnics we created a whole process of communication with our clients on everyday basis in order to understand their requirements, needs and desires better, share existing problems, look for solutions together and avoid misunderstandings on every stage of project implementation. We also try to make our clients prepared to the fact that there still might be communication lag due to differences in time and cultural differences. Furthermore, our clients' concerns are addressed in regular project evaluations. 

Another point of concern is attempts of many companies to start working with their offshore partners on large-scale projects right away, instead of starting small. SoftTechnics has tried to overcome this hurdle over the years with having started working on small projects with our clients, gradually building our reputation, clientele and scopes of projects. Moreover, ODC models that SoftTechnics offers center on limited number of programmers on a team (from two to seven) in order to better access skills and knowledge of every team member. Time-boxing is another aspect of team work on projects at SoftTechnics.

At SoftTechnics we also realize that any team, even the best and the most disciplined one, needs to be managed. Hence, the company tries to find and hire the right managers who could facilitate instead of simply dictate and who could work equally well with IT professionals and businesses. On-sight training cannot be overestimated. It is a crucial element of every team's work at SoftTechnics. We try to provide our teams with as much related information on the client, whose project they are working on, as possible so that they clearly understand goals, vision, values and desired outcome. 

SoftTechnics is a growing mobile and web applications and game development company, providing ODC services, and is constantly in search of new partners for future collaboration. However, we understand how important it is to pick the right partner on both ends. Hence, we continuously try to build a proven track record as a reliable agile development partner.

Another problem frequently mentioned in describing unsuccessful offshore agile development projects is substantial difference in time zones, which leads to lack of communication and inability to hold daily scrums, which are a vital element of agile development methodology. SoftTechnics rarely faces this kind of problem. We have only a 7-hour difference with our New York-based office and minor time difference with European countries. Furthermore, our dedicated teams are always willing to work on interesting projects that they become deeply involved in.

Our journey of agile development gave us a whole lot of great projects that we are proud of. In some other five years we hope to have many more brave and fantastic projects and partners who will be proud to say they worked with SoftTechnics.