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How can Anthill help me support Offshore Development?

A challenging aspect of offshore development is gaining visibility into the development process while maintaining control. For example, do you know what developer made what changes in the latest release that went into production? Do you know that all the automated unit tests were run and passed on the latest build that made it into production? Were automated functional tests run and did they all pass? If not, then how did the build make it all the way to production?

AnthillPro can help you regain visibility into your off-shore development process so that you can once again feel like you know what is going on, your experience is being utilized, and the process and safeguards that you designed are actually being followed.

When you use AnthillPro as your BMS (Build Management Server) and ALA (Application Lifecycle Automation server), every build comes with a Bill of Materials detailing all the developers that changed files and what files they changed since the previous build. You can also set up nightly builds that will include a report of all source code changes made the previous day, including who made what change and why.

With AnthillPro, you can also configure workflows requiring that build artifacts first pass automated unit tests and automated functional tests before being promoted into the production environment. This is just an example, as you can configure any type of process and any type of requirement on builds that are being promoted into production.

Communication, Communication, Communication

One of the most difficult things about offshore development is communication. Anyone that has lived through the conference calls at 7:30am and 11:30pm has experienced this first-hand. But even conference calls don't solve the communication problem. E-mail is probably the most often used communication tool on offshore projects. Files are often shipped back and forth using e-mail. Revisions to files are made and shipped back. This process continues until virtually no one is on the same page.

How does your offshore team deliver artifacts for deployment? Do they send you an EAR file or some other binary artifact? Can you recover the source code that was used to produce that artifact? Is there a guarantee that the source code that you think was used to generate the file was actually used to produce the artifact? The ideal way for handing off deliverables is to use AnthillPro. The offshore team would kick off a build of their project through AnthillPro. AnthillPro would produce the binary artifacts based on the specified source code and would provide for traceability from artifacts to source code. The artifacts of the AnthillPro build could then be deployed to an environment. AnthillPro would manage the deployment or could integrate with another deployment tool. This way, there is guaranteed traceability from artifacts all the way back to the source.

Being There: Location Independence

While it is true that there is no substitute for being there, one of the more difficult aspects of being off site is access to servers and to deployment environments. Often times the deployment environments are cut off from the rest of the network, especially from outside access. This makes it very difficult for offshore teams to remotely access such environments.