We are extending development teams with experienced offshore developers

Case written by Kasun - Senior Software Engineer

Currently we are developing a real-time web application for a leading company in Europe and the USA. The application collects data from the client's sales web sites and displays it on a special chart. This application uses real-time data. For example the user can see the real time visitors for each of his products in the web site and the interactions between each product. Here we use Flex remoting, which smoothest communication between the Flex application and the back-end, and takes the relevant data from the customer's side. It also displays the real time visitors by geographical location. The client can then examine the area where most of the visitors are situated.

Tools that we used

• Adobe Flex builder 3 with Flex SDK 3.5.
• Adobe Flash Professional CS 5
• AMF PHP 1.2

Team and Communication

We, at BlueCorp Professionals understand that the success of any project depends on the quality of communication between the client and the development team.

Our team has two front end developers and three back-end developers. The back-end developers are responsible for PHP scripting and SQL triggers, while the front end developers deal with Flex.

We use web meetings (web-ex, net meeting), instant messaging, e-mails, regular phone calls, phone calls via VOIP and video conferencing to ensure smooth communication.

For projects with an onshore-offshore delivery model, face to face communication between the client and the onshore team helps in building trust. The onshore team regularly communicates with the offshore team to seamlessly transfer the business requirements to the development team.

Duration and Deadlines

With our distractions out of the way and our development habits in mind we are ready to divide up our project. We identify the difficult tasks and our reward tasks and make a "to-do" list for the coming weeks. We also set daily objectives each morning from a weekly task list. These objectives may be completing tasks or completing a section of a large task. We keep the objectives small and realistic for one work day. Any uncompleted tasks from our previous day are moved to the top of the next day's task list. If we are not completing all our set objectives each day, we will re-examine our distractions, development habits and task list for areas to reevaluate.

We discuss the deadline and project duration with our client without any hesitations. They always keep track of us and give us fair time durations for our development.