30 Days in Agile Software Development

I am proud to announce that Jim Wang, Shinetech’s Vice President, Global Delivery, recently completed the Chinese translation of Software in 30 Days, written by the creators of Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. The book will be on sale in China this month.

The preface of the Chinese version was written by Jerry Zhang, President & General Manager of Shinetech. He explains how Agile and Scrum methodologies emphasize transparency, efficiency and collaboration, which are important principles in offshore outsourcing.

Zhang talks about how Shinetech uses Agile not only with our software development teams, but also as part of our corporate culture. Here is an excerpt from the preface:

“In 2007, Shinetech introduced the Agile concept to the business model of offshore outsourcing. Training and developing Agile software programmers also became one of the development strategies of the company. With the spread of Scrum processes within the company, we realized that it is difficult for Scrum to survive as a special case within the organization. The entire organization had to be integrated into Scrum. Transformation has to come from within to make sure that Agile is rooted in the organization.

Shinetech also applies the Scrum model of management to its internal operations. Every morning at 10:00, the management team has a 15-minute Stand-up Meeting.  A Retrospective Meeting also takes place every Friday afternoon. The Operations Officer acts as the Product Owner and drafts a monthly Backlog to review at the end of the month according to the yearly target. The members of the functional departments form many cross-functional teams. They employ the same mechanism to solve various problems encountered in daily management. As is illustrated in the last chapter of this book, we discovered that Agile can be a powerful weapon for the organization in solving a variety of complex problems of management and projects.”

-- Jerry Zhang, Shinetech CEO

Learn more about how we use Agile Practices at Shinetech or read our other blogs about Agile and Scrum methodologies.