Fixed bid approach :

Many of our customers don’t want to assume the risk of deliveries by offshore teams. They want us to assume ownership of the project and deliver features and functionalities. We work on such projects on fixed bid basis.

• Iteration zero and estimation exercise - Agile not only allows but encourages requirements to change. Synerzip uses iteration zero to analyze the requirements and to make a list of priotatized requirements grouped as “Must Have”, “Should Have”, “Could Have” and “Good to Have”. At the time of bidding we know that not all requirements would be delivered but all “must haves” would be definitely delivered.
• Chain of fixed bid projects - Fixed bid work doesn’t earn profits if your team is not familiar with the domain and the technology. Therefore Synerzip believes in long term partnerships which give our teams an opportunity to learn the domain and the technology. If the customer is committed to a series of fixed bid projects ; Synerzip will invest in the initial few fixed bid projects which are not profitable. The operation becomes viable once the team scales the learning curve.

Dual Shore Agile is in our DNA!

We value people over process :

Synerzip’s agile approach is more about the way we staff and train our agile teams than about techniques such as TDD and CI.

• We look for good analytical skills and problem solving abilities while recruiting people. More stress on hands on coding work than on management.
• Synerzip trains its resources on the job. We utilize bench resources to shadow teams engaged with our current customers. These additional efforts are utilized for creating Value toppings – meaning items that are delivered over and above what is expected.

Agile adoption :

Synerzip has adopted the following agile best practices with varying degrees of success

• Scrum - Almost all our teams conduct a daily stand up meeting which lasts for about 15 minutes to cover what was done on the previous day, to inform what is planned for that day and to report roadblocks if any.
• Sprint - Meaning short iterations. True to the agile spirit we not only allow but encourage requirements to change. Therefore it’s a standard practice at Synerzip to break down the requirements in smaller fully functional deliverables that can be handled in short iterations of 3 to 4 weeks. Shorter the iteration closer is the adherence to changing requirements.
• Automation of unit and regression tests - In a short iteration of 3 to 4 weeks there is no time for integration and testing unless its done in parallel with coding. This is possible because of automation. We include automated test scripts in our build scripts- thus if a test fails the build fails. This ensures that testing is done for every integration step and any regression is detected right there.
• TDD- Synerzip has had a very mild success with test driven development. We are now experimenting with behavior driven development using RSPEC.
• CI -Almost all builds are automated but Continuous Integration is sporadic. Meaning we rarely force every check in to automatically fire the build process.
• User stories and estimates
• Retrospectives
• Agile Coding Practices

Our commitment :

Commitment to practicing agile is demonstrated more by what we don’t do than by what we do.

• Avoid waterfall architecture and big bang approach
• No copious documentation of requirements
• Avoid Psuedo agile work – meaning no documentation , no QA – just code.
• We don’t work in isolation without close customer feedback.