Exigen Services, a leading provider of IT outsourcing services in Russia and Eastern Europe, participated in Software Development Best Practices Moscow 2007, a conference held in Moscow on April 3 and 4. Exigen Services acted as a silver-level sponsor of the conference; company specialists Sergey Andrzheyevsky and Sergey Belov have presented their papers and participated in the CMMI/Agile round table.

The Software Development Best Practices conference held annually in Boston (USA) by the world-renowned Dr.Dobb’s Journal has for the first time been held in Moscow. Besides the leading Russian software developer companies, the event gathered such IT industry leaders as Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Sun, Motorola and others.

The conference program included a number of key issues in the field of design, development and project management. One of the main topics appearing in numerous papers and discussions was the use of agile methodologies to improve the speed and quality of development. This was the very topic addressed in the papers by the specialists from Exigen Services, an undeniable leader in the use of agile methodologies (such as XP and SCRUM) in Russia.

In his paper entitled “Guerilla XP”, Sergey Belov provided an account of Exigen’s successful experience in adapting the XP methodology to the situations where an active involvement of client’s representative in the project is impossible. The company uses this approach for numerous projects, the largest of which exceeding 6000 man-days.

Sergey Andrzheyevsky’s paper was dedicated to the theoretical foundations and practical application aspects of XP. The speaker explained the fundamental differences between the traditional development and extreme programming and, using successful XP projects by Exigen Services as examples, expounded the specifics of XP in offshore programming.

Mr. Andrzeyevsky and Mr. Belov were also invited to the discussion of compatibility of the CMMI standard with agile methodologies (in the context of the CMMI/Agile round table). The specialists from Exigen Services used more than 5 years of company’s experience as an illustration to demonstrate that the use of agile methodologies goes along quite well with the CMMI quality management approach, providing for a substantial productivity and quality growth even in organizations certified to the top levels of CMMI.

“I am pleased to see the interest on the part of the companies planning to use XP and SCRUM in their work. A great deal of attention was also attracted by X-Man, the XP project management program we have developed,” says Sergey Andrzeyevsky. “The conference has demonstrated that agile methodologies are quickly becoming the mainstream of today’s software development.”