Today, most of the product companies have adopted distributed product development for reducing cost and shortening time to market. At the same time, companies have adopted agile models for product development. But agile model is mainly around individuals, interactions and customer collaboration. Individuals are mainly developers, customers and managers. An Agile development team is supposed to be self-managed, informal and open. Due to this, distributed agile development comes with certain challenges. Blue Star Infotech, with its experience in multiple distributed agile product development initiatives for leading ISVs, has built a platform called ‘Star Agile’ for increased efficiency and lower risk. Star agile uses the ‘StarSmart’ framework as a core execution methodology. Though StarSmart is built on SCRUM, this framework is designed to adapt to different agile practices such as ‘Test Driven Development’, ‘Pair Programming’, ‘Continuous Integration’ and ‘Refactoring’. Like other agile models, StarSmart also uses working software as the primary measure of progress. This framework facilitates transparency; hence it enables early identification of risks.

StarAgile platform is built on industry leading tools to enable real time collaboration and automate the processes used in ‘StarSmart’. StarAgile framework provides end to end traceability of the project from business requirements to the release. Various components of the framework addresses following functional areas:

• Requirement Management
• Project management
• Test management
• Configuration Management
• Build and Continuous Integration
• Dashboards and reports

Advantages of ‘Star Agile’:

• Higher return on R&D investment
• Shorter Revenue Realization Cycle
• Higher efficiency through process automation
• Lower risk