Across several blog posts, we have covered agile development for teams as well as agile development outsourcing for startups. It should not be a big surprise to anyone therefore, that we have been forwarding our experience in outsourced agile development to a growing list of clients.

What we offer are dedicated agile developer teams where the development is completely managed through us. Welcome to your outsourced project office.

We can do the writing of the user-stories (core story, wireframes and acceptance tests), the project management of the development (iteration planning, daily update meetings, status tracking & reporting) as well as the initial acceptance testing. What we find is that every project is different and we adjust our agile development outsourcing framework to these requirements. The existence of a concise framework allows us to quite rapidly set-up operations for new clients and ensures that learning's can be leveraged across our clients.

At the heart of all project management stands communication. We use a range of tools to support communication across distances. These are in no particular order Skype, conference-call rooms, project intranet and a fantastic collaboration/ white-boarding e-room. We've played with the idea of sending Mac Mini's out to clients that have a permanent team-size of >=5 to allow smooth video-conferencing via iChat (as opposed to the poor quality in Skype) but have yet to act on this thought.

We strive to provide the ultimate in transparency and as much information as possible as to the current status and delivery dates. And working in short iteration cycles of about 3-4 weeks, depending on the client, with tools (currently XPlanner, although we might start using TargetProcess) to monitor the progress of a project provides us with a wealth of information. Every day, a core group of people receives a daily update status mail that lists progress on the different stories we would be working on. Every other week, we issue a bi-weekly report and at the end of every iteration we issue a report on what was completed and moved to the next iteration.

It can be challenging to attempt agile development across distances and throughout the last year we have had many good learning experiences. Not everyone has a unit-testing framework for example so continuous testing and starting with tests is not an option (although we will propose implementing a framework at no cost as it will help us increase our overall throughput and raise code quality). Not having the customer with you means that acceptance testing feedback can be difficult to collect (we now do 'live' testing sessions using our e-rooms screen sharing and note-taking facilities). Knocking on doors to get quick feedback on interaction designs will not be possible (so we always start with a wireframe exercise, now using Axure to create very realistic demo's of the user-interface).

All in all though we know that the outcome using our agile development outsourcing framework guarantees our clients greater flexibility in their planning, increased ability to provide us with feedback that will actually be integrated, a better sense of the different project status and a higher overall output than compared with outsourced development teams operating "the old" way.

Soon we will provide some examples of how we perform our iteration planning sessions, keep clients on top of things and collaborate with them and our outsourcing team on project requirements and execution. We are considering providing a "test-drive" to a selected few interested parties tempted to try our agile development outsourcing services as well, more on that coming up.

It is a commonly known fact by now that when a company is looking to create not only a simple, static-content website (for which transLucidonline blink, blink would of course be optimal) but wishes to re-use content, manage multiple sites with many editors, that an evaluation of open-source content-management-systems (CMS) is a very good option. I for one am actually of the personal opinion that for the vast majority of all cases it is *the* option to at least evaluate open- with closed-source CMS.

Lesser known is what to do when it comes to building a website that supports e-commerce transactions. There are now several viable options in the open-source world for companies to choose between for specialised e-commerce platforms. There seem to be so many in fact, that even I who is supposed to be an e-commerce "expert" hadn't heard about some of the new frontrunner's.

Following are three different platforms that i believe to hold the greatest potential in surviving the recent boost in e-commerce systems due to the large developer community and/or support from sponsoring companies supporting these open-source projects. I might add more detail to this "review" later on; for now, here we go.

1) OSCommerce; the princess of open-source e-commerce systems and probably the one that is best known with the largest developer community and a myriad of extensions. Good luck on picking your winner of the package to install and use, there are some packages that create a link with existing CMS such as Ubercart for Drupal

2) Magento which i was sent a link to by someone who had used it very successfully and who found the solution both architecturally very sound, easy to learn and enabling him to launch his site in a very short amount of time. They certainly have to still build a large following but there seems to be just an incredible drive from Varien, the company behind Magento which integrates really everything that you need to run a great e-commerce site in a nicely packaged form that will run out of the box.

3) OpenTaps (based on OFBiz) is astounding in terms of the feature scope it offers; this is clearly the choice for a company wanting to set up a full e-commerce operations, including ware-housing and customer-service. It is sponsored by the Apache Foundation, running under the "Apache Open For Business Project" based on Java technology. The feature list is simply too long to list, so check it out yourself. There is however a nice overview they provide on the opentaps site which i integrated below. Once again, this would be my choice to create the next Amazon.

Having worked at Amazon.de and Amazon.com for such a long time, i find it mind-boggling to see that there are now open-source platforms available that offer many of the same features and scalability that Amazon had 3-4 years ago. No need for a hundred developers, get yourself one or two and build your dream e-commerce site in under three months. It shows just how evolved the open-source landscape has become.

PS: While researching some of this entry, i found a wonderful review that a company called WebDistortion did on "9 kick ass open-source e-commerce platforms"; they provide a good overview of PHP solutions available.

As a company that provides consulting and outsourcing services to medium-sized and corporate companies, we have to strike a balance between being on the cutting edge and not loosing the focus at the same time to translate new tools & methodologies into concrete benefits for our clients.

For quite a while now - as early as 2006 in fact - we have been posting on collaboration tools and how they can enhance interaction for distributed as well as local teams, including the possibilities of 3D virtual worlds such asSecondLife or Croquet.

At the same time, we have used many tools ourselves most of which we discarded as being not user-friendly, slow or not fitting to our requirements. Being in the same situation as other product development companies of having to co-ordinate people across three, sometimes four time-zones, we needed an application with a broad range of tools, the swiss army-knife of collaboration tools.

We were actually featured last year October in the Australian Financial Review and could only agree (yep, there was some shoulder tapping) that Theandb was "an example of globalisation at work and how the use of technology can compete with much larger companies". Some more quotes that i could not put any better:

"We could not have successfully moved the business to Australia and kept some of our longstanding, former clients without this technology," Ponthus says.

Theandb relies on the facility to consult with businesses across Europe and Australasia, helping them develop online strategies and implement web projects.

Theandb's work involves regular meetings to ensure everyone involved knows the stage a project has reached and what their responsibilities are."

The best thing about using this system is that there's no disagreement at the end of a meeting about what everyone needs to do for follow-up and what was said during the meeting because the project manager writes the notes directly into a whiteboard that everyone sees," Schliebitz says."

Back at that time we were using Marratech which was unfortunately bought up by Google.

Only last week we finally - after months of research and trying out way too many different web1.0 and 2.0 applications - we found the perfect replacement, an application that is even better than Marratech was and it goes by the name Elluminate. We will post more on this wonderful tool soon.

We have seen vast improvements in communication and the ability to collaborate with our clients since starting to have Elluminate. We can finally be literally on the same page again, share our desktops, write up meeting notes which everyone can read and comment on while the meeting is taking place, use the excellent whiteboarding features, paste in screenshots and doodle around on them; simply put it is like working together in the same office, only far more efficient because you can actually fully concentrate on what is at hand.

We are quite aware that using such tools gives us an advantage over other suppliers in the development outsourcing market and will continue to elaborate on our outsourcing framework and general set-up as we learn with our clients. We will post more on the framework we use and why we believe it to be unique shortly.

With our involvement in the creation of transLucidonline, the simple website publishing system for small- to medium-sized companies, through our UK entity Pantha Software, we discovered a little the start-up scene in Sydney. And discovered that there were many more Web2.0 start-ups than we ever imagined, the term 'silicon beach' a very fitting term for this beautiful strip of land we live and work in.

Whereas in Silicon Valley it feels that the same errors as in the first web 1.0 bubble are repeated (buzz, buzz, buzzzzzwords galore, geeky-sounding company names, skyrocketing valuations, ...), the hype ever growing and insiders starting to worry that it's all a little bit of history repeating, i got the feeling from talking to some startups here that things seemed a little bit more grounded overall. Being far away from the Microsofts and Googles of this world and "alone" on a large island can be good when you are trying to build something of lasting value, where long-term goals can have higher priority than short-term return.

Just my 2 cents. Certainly, our office location is not the worst.

The following entry is about our experience in launching transLucidonline, THE simple website publishing system, through our UK entity Pantha Software.

We believed there to be a lot of value in working agile for web-development projects even before we started working on transLucidonline. But then, call it an initial lack of experience in managing a product launch ourselves, we commenced development of the portal site using a waterfall methodology. "Of course", the project did not go well. We specified something that we asked the outsourcing company to develop for a fixed price, they delivered what they believed we had meant and it turned out to be of low quality (in terms of code/ architecture) and not exactly what we had in mind. From there on, it was a back and forth that resulted in more and more "change requests" which in return increased the budget over what had been allocated before to the portal site.

Long story made short: We switched companies, started working agile with them as well as an expert (on Zope & Plone , which we use for the portal site) from day1 on and have since then always been happy with the progress made.

This was also due to the excellent people we were now working with and some of the things inherent in agile development which can be broken down into:

* Planning
We set out with a planning of the major features necessary for transLucidonline. This created the basis for our 'product backlog' which was/ is a prioritised list of features we want to develop.

* Defining the individual features
We worked down our list of features in an iterative fashion with new functionality to be tested on a regular basis. The stories were well defined but did not have the depths (=lots of work) that a "standard" business specification would have. Which meant we talked with our development team on what we had in mind.

* Technical reflection on the requirements
From these discussions, the developers reflected on our business requirements by writing up the technical tasks they believed needed to be undertaken to complete the required functionality.

* Prototyping
Once we had found agreement, the development would commence. Sometimes we were able to see prototypes early on to test and give further feedback on. Most often, the individual features could be completed in 1-2 weeks development time which we felt did not require initial prototypes.

* Testing
Once it came to testing, we would use the user-acceptance tests (UATs) as previously defined in the user stories describing the required functionality. Based on the testing, development would either continue or be "officially" defined as completed.

Overall, thanks also to our unit-testing framework, we have been able to complete quite a long list of features with very minimum up-front investment. Furthermore, this way of working allowed us to continue to run our consulting business while at the same time spending time on product development internally. There was a constant flow, rather than spikes of code to be specified, developed and tested with XPlanner providing us with an accurate, up-to-date view on what progress had been made on a daily basis.

We are never going to go back to the waterfall ways of development and i would recommend any other startup-director to do the same.

With all these Web 2.0 start-ups (oh, we are one of them with transLucidonline i guess) all around it is not often to find one that is extra special.

Today I think that I found one of those gems that I am sure will not stay hidden very long. The Rubicon project is a service through which site owners can manage their advertising space. No, not only Google AdWords. About any ad/ partner network the world has to offer, currently about 300 (!) of them. And they automatically adjust which ads to show more often based on their individual performance. Coupled with a great dashboard over the ad space and earnings performance, this looks like a real killer app. Someones seems to have gotten it right.

I have immediately integrated it into our private website theandb.com and we are certainly - if these initial tests prove fruitful - going to use it for transLucidonline, the simple website publishing system, going forward. What a wonderfully painless way to manage your ad-inventory space.