The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) published the results of the annual rating “The Global Outsourcing 100″. In 2011 four Belarusian IT software development companies appeared in the rating. How have they managed to do it? What is the result of such success?

One of the main reasons is using new effective technologies in the sphere of management, agile being one of them.
Recently agile software development is considered to be panacea for all woes turning any IT project into successful. Many western clients give preference to the companies working with agile.

The main peculiarities of agile are:

•    risk sharing – at present there are two main types of interaction with a client – fixed-priced and time-and-material contracts. In the first case all the risks on the project fall on the contractor, while in the second type the client pays for the actual work, which works little on the final result;
•    predictability – the refusal from long-term planning as well as the absence of figures on schedule and cost of the product in general;
•    regular feedback – the customer can introduce comments and alterations practically from the beginning of the project;
•    easy and quick reaction to changes in functional requirements as well as priorities;
•    selforganization – which allows escaping from the excessive management structure.

Why don’t companies want to switch to Agile?

The first reason is conventionalism: many companies think it’s not a good idea to change the familiar scheme which works and bring profit. The second reason is lack of experience in using the new system and the fear of failure in getting non-achieving immediate results. The third reason is additional resources for creating the working team and supporting its highly productive state.

Thus, in order to minimize the risk one a software development company should ope the ground for implementing Аgile on various levels: management level and development level.  This process can take from 3 to 6 months but the effect in the long term is worth doing it.

On February, 21 the Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org) declared the name of the laureate of the Prize – one of the most prestige science award in the IT sphere. For the first time the laureate of this award was a woman – a 75 year-old Frances Allen. She has worked for IBM since 1975. Missis Allen took part in research-and-development activities in the field of parallel computing, that is used in most computing machinery.

In 1989 г. Allen was the first woman who got oneself into the list of the IBM Fellow – the most prestigious technical status in the corporation.

The example of Frances Allen isn’t the only example of a woman who achieved success in the IT sphere.

Many critics think that the first developer was a woman. Lovelace Augusta Ada King had become a programmer long before the first computers were invented. She was a mathematician and she was interested in the works of Charles Bebbidge who created the project “Analytical engine“ – theoretical footing of the first computer creation. Lovelace translated from French to English the famous work of Menabrea in 1842 and added her comments to it. Her comments to this work were very useful for the science development – there were a lot of methods of practical application of computers and argumentation about entertaining application of computers. Also Ada wrote her own method of Bernulli numbers’ calculation , that is known as the first famous computer program. Ada is the author of such terms in modern programming as subprogramme, circle, working cell and etc.

Grace Murray Hopper ranks her place in the list of the most eminent woman in the IT sphere too. She took part in the investigation of the first computer – an electro-mechanical system Mark I. In the 9th of September, 1945 Grace found a bug (an insect) when she was testing Mark II. Since that incident the testing terminology has been replenished by the new term.

Also she is the author of another widespread term – compiler. COBOL language is her achievement too. She created it in 1959 and since that time Miss Grace Murray Hopper has had the nickname “COBOL grandmother”.

We have a lot of examples of women’s achievements in the present time. For example, Joanna Rutkowska (Poland) who took part in the development of rootkit- technologies.