Goal Europe recently published a research study that indicates 47% outsourcing market growth in Ukraine in year 2006. As the market reached $246 million I believe that it will continue to increase this and coming years because Ukraine has several important advantages over China and India. Some of them outlined in the report are

• availability of highly-educated professionals;
• no or lesser time-zone difference with Europe and USA;
• less noticeable cultural difference

All of that combined with general orientation to Western world make Ukraine an attractive outsourcing destination.

Research indicates that there were 7639 professionals working in IT industry in 2006. This means that almost 10% of all Ukrainian developers are working at SoftServe because as we announced at the end of year 2006 that number of employees increased up to 700 people.

SoftServe continues its lead by achieving most competencies among IT companies in Ukraine. Microsoft also recognizes SoftServe's accomplishments by selecting the company among top finalists for the 2007 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award in Custom Development Solutions, Web Development.

Not only this distinguishes SoftServe from other outsourcing services providers in Eastern Europe and proves that the company is valuable partner for its clients, but also highlights that SoftServe great and exciting place to work at. Check out our vacancies.

I long thought if I want to publish these photos with kind permission of the author. First photo shows greatness of  local university by depicting a braindump of a student before exam on Software Engineering:

Unfortunately, exam was held in this auditorium (and, to my pity, such auditoriums are not uncommon):

Going to REMIX'07 in Budapest I've made a 800 km journey by train through almost all of the Ukraine. To my pity every here and there along the rail-road I saw abandoned industrial buildings which are slowly ruined by rains and winds as the time goes. Such a landscape makes you even more sad if you think that 10-15 years ago some people did build those buildings for purpose. And those buildings were real accomplishments on the way to their goals. But then something changed and suddenly nobody was interested in using and keeping then. Nobody had enough courage (or vision, probably) not to build and nobody had enough persistence (or vision, again) to make real use of the building.

Now all those buildings appear to be a waste. Waste of resources, money and human energy. I'm sure you've seen such monuments of waste everywhere: on the Web, as abandoned sites, in day-to-day life, as goods or tools or whatever that were bought but never used, on the streets, as flower-beds that are no longer taken care about.

You do not have that much time and energy to invest into waste. So carry projects you start through to make sure that your efforts will not be called waste some day and start only project you really want to carry through.

Microsoft VSTS Process Templates homepage features Cognizant Feature Driven Development process template. Cognizant adds many (too many, actually) new concepts to FDD so that the process looses its elegant simplicity and focus. Instead of focusing on bug-free feature implementations with low deviation in development time they introduce a concept of "bug". Simple and powerful process indicators dominated by sophisticated work items state transitions. If there is a choice, I'd use "original" FDD even without tool support.

More information on "original" Feature Driven Development:

Feature Driven Development portal
Agile Software Development using FDD
FDD Overview Presentation

This is actually a repeat of my older post from my old blog. But it is summer again, so why not?

Here in Ukraine you can more and more often hear people asking "How were they grown?" when they buy some vegetables. Especially when they are going to buy early vegetables that are difficult if at all possible cultivate by "usual" process and get harvest this early. What this essentially means is that people are interested in the process used to achieve the result. Why they would want to know that? Because this helps customers evaluate quality of the product. It helps customers understand internal characteristics of the product they are about to buy. And here not only the process or quality assurance procedures itself matter but also the ability to effectively communicate benefits of the process to win customers' trust is important.

The same thing happens with software development. We want to build trust relationships with our customers. But this means that we have to give them a look at what is going inside, we have to provide transparency for the customers. It is extremely difficult and sometimes very inefficient to build trust without transparency. So think twice before replying to customer's "How are you going to achieve this result?" with "Just trust us. We will do it."

More on this topic in David Anderson's post "No Trust without Transparency".

Every once in while in my day-to-day life I observe situations which make me think and draw analogies with my professional activities. Also I found that when I try to explain some concept to somebody I often use different analogies to make my speech more understandable and memorable. So I decided to start a series of posts called Projections of life where I will document my observations and thoughts. I hope they will be interesting and useful to you. So check out my Projections of life.

How do you define “dead technology”? My definition is that dead technology is no longer used to build new systems. Old legacy systems may be still running, may be still maintained, but no new development takes place. ComputerWorld proposes top 10 list of dead technologies.

It is amusing how some technologies gained to much momentum that we are speaking of them half-a-century after they were first introduced.

Just came across this series of podcasts published by BBC World Service – The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management. Going to listen to them in the nearest future.

Business is about making a difference. Difference to customers, difference to partners, difference to employees. Now how you are different and why it is good or bad and act appropriately. Check out this material about difference (via Joel).