When software developers work within an environment that encourages them to question/validate requirements, be involved in the creation of the specification as well as the actual development of the software, I believe it has a really positive impact on the end product.
This may seem to some people like standard practise, however I find when managing off-shore teams it is a discipline that can be easily lost. it is allot more difficult and tempting to do all of the requirements gathering and specification on-shore and then push a document across, have a quick chat about it and let the dev team get on with it.
Sometimes one can get carried away with the making sure you are getting maximum value out of the development team by making them spend most of the time coding, rather than reading/writing documents, participating in discussions and so on.
Freeing up the development team to spend the time needed to engage early on with the project allows them to: understand the wider goal; become more involved through the lifecycle; have more sense of ownership for the end result; and ultimately develop better solutions.
Comments