Sibers Kyrgyz office: 1 Anniversary

While Russian power grows with Siberia, as our famous scientist Michael Lomonosov said, Sibers’ power grows with our Bishkek office, which was opened a year ago. It was quite a fruitful year, and Sibers’ top management represented by Yuriy Bannov and Alex Shpak visited this mountainous land to celebrate the event.

Sibers delegation arrived in Bishkek soon after the Kyrgyz revolution and was satisfied to notice that the riots did not affect our office business processes. The results of them were reviewed in a warm and comfortable, hospitable atmosphere. Bishkek guys were curious to learn first-hand Sibers’ favorite practices and traditions as well as the reasons for opening such a distant from Akademgorodok office and our expectations. Meeting included visiting some cafes and restaurants, and as a result the office museum got its first exhibit, a chair. (Sibers offices have a collection of artifacts that are very dear to our hearts due to different circumstances.)

Yuriy Bannov, Sibers CEO and Eugeniya Zelenovskaya, Head of Sibers Kyrgyz branch

Of course, going to a mountainous land cannot go without a trip to the mountains. Bishkek is a very picturesque place famous for its nature treasures. The destination chosen was a ski base Oruu-Sie, located 37km away from the city at the level of 2100m above the sea level. The city, especially with its night illumination, looks just awesome from there!

Having treated themselves to large amounts of pilav and barbeque, taken a lot of nice pictures and visited a sauna with beer, everybody was delighted to realize that Sibers traditions of celebration were imported to Bishkek quite safely and without malfunctions. Our executives were also glad to congratulate our Bishkek colleagues with good progress, which is supported by high grades on Elance, positive balance and numerous praises from our customers.

Sibers CEO Yuriy Bannov in Kyrgyz mountains

A good start is worth such efforts.

October Achievements

By Serge Markov, CEO

Our October results show stable and steady rise in production, which is thanks to all the staff contribution. The month turned out loaded, and we grew both extensively and intensively – Sibers welcomed its 100th employee and has demonstrated good performance.

S&M department brought 16 new projects; HR department processed 83 resumes and conducted 6 qualifying evaluations; our social projects are being implemented and some new ones are under development; infrastructure is constantly improving. The rise is continuous and systematic, which is a factor of stability.

Capisco Italiano

By Serge Markov, CEO

I have just returned from a vacation to Italy, where I spent a good time with my family and also had a wonderful opportunity to meet some of our clients. The meetings were warm and hearty with plenty of both official and informal talks and communication.

The first meeting, in Milan, was with our customer for whom we are developing VOIX – a piece of VOIP software you could already read in our blog. The customer rated very highly our work and said a lot of praising words about our VoIP Engineer and Unix Team Leader Sergey Parfenenok. Then the communication (and us) relocated to a chalet at Monte Rosa, a picturesque mountain with breathtaking views.

We went sightseeing, tracking and had a lot of informal friendly communication. I got acquainted with our customer’s family and friends, who turned out extremely nice people and good company. Some of them even know Russian and have been to Moscow. We had a perfect unforgettable weekend in the mountains and saw a lot of Milan sights as well. My family and I are thankful to these nice people for their hospitality.

Another meeting, in Venice, was held with our client from Hostelsclub. We are developing a web service, which allows ordering and booking hostels and inns in Venice. Our client has also been to Moscow on several occasions; moreover they have a Russian employee Irina there, so our communication was easy and enjoyable. The client complimented our developers for their professional work and promised to extend our collaboration. We continued our pleasant talk in a café not far from the client’s office and one of the main Venice sights – San Marco Square (Piazza San Marco).

I would like to take the opportunity and thank our customers once more for their kind hospitality and invite them (as well as our other clients) to visit Sibers.

Monthly Report: March

On Friday, we spent all evening reviewing our results in March. Many of our colleagues were decided to be awarded with a bonus. We had a very productive month: the turnover has increased comparing to February. That is a significant achievement of our Sales Managers.
The CTO Department spent most of its efforts estimating a large project and preparing detailed technical specifications for it. Most probably, the project will be put to development in April-May.

Our Project Managers performed shock work and ensured going ahead of the plan. Best results were showed by Mike Teltsov and his team led by Alexey ‘wikkid’ Kupershtokh. We also noted achievements of Grigory Dmitrenko, Andrey Mamontov, and Andrey Turchaev.

Our Customer Care managers are still overburdened with work. Beginning from March, we started to track load of CC Managers and carefully record incidents that we recognized. This ensures safer outsourcing.

The IT department performed a lot of planned work – we are actively building infrastructure based on open-source solutions, have prepared a sample developer’s workstation on Linux and improved the power system for our servers to avoid blackouts and prevent changes of voltage.

As a result of the company’s growth, our HR department has plenty of work, too. During the month, we worked on about 10 new positions, received over 90 new resumes and held about 30 interviews. Four people became our new colleagues.

9 New Projects This Week

This week our Sales department is breaking its records and we put 9 new long-term projects into development. Without disclosing our clients’ private information, I just mention technologies the projects are in.

1 project for MacOSX
1 project in .Net/Windows Forms
1 Flash project
2 PHP projects
2 Java projects (for web)
1 VoIP project
And we launched architecture and specifications phase for a large Internet project.

It’s good to mention that several projects are our return clients who decided to give us new work.

Trends in Sales, Marketing and Pre-Development

One of the most important aspects in the entire pre-development phase is producing accurate relevant estimates and proposals. This work is a responsibility of our Sales Managers and CTO Team.

This week we had a seminar organized by the CTO Group for our Team Leaders. CTO Andrey Gavrilov explained the Team Leaders the core factors of a good estimate and how to put together a technical proposal. From the Sales side, we work on submitting the information for proposals in a more structured format. In the nearest time, we’ll publish an RFP template for our clients – look for it at www.hirerussians.com. It will allow prospective clients to better formulate their needs and speed up the estimation process.

We keep on enhancing our sites. You could notice a new page of www.hirerussians.com. The Marketing Team continues to bring new functionality to www.sibers.com.

digg.com for $200 or What Can HireRussians from eLance Do for Your Startup?

By Sergey Markov Sibers CEO

A lot of hype these days is about October’s article in eLance and NewsWeek magazine concerning discussion at digg.com and in particular the fact that initial investment into development into well-known digg.com was as little as $200. What I got from the discussion with reference to our experience:

• Outsourcing software development can be a very good solution for startups even in web 2.0 or other IT technologies areas – you can get experienced developer quickly (it is a matter of hours or days) and at a very competitive price.
• Work for startup should be done in iterations – you can see your ideas live and then whole picture will change. Now agreement with outsourcing company will really matter. If your contract is “agile” enough, you can implement your new ideas without additional overhead and thus get a better innovative product.
• If your ideas are pretty clear, do not underestimate effort to get final (or best-selling) version of your innovation. Of course, the first iteration was $200, but they mentioned that they had spent a lot more to get version that was sold for $$$ millions.

Finally, I ‘d like to make you sure – building a new business on top of outsourced development services really works, and HireRussians know how and have enough experience to make your dream come true into an innovative product!

Can HireRussians developers build software for iPhone?

Written by Sibers CEO Serge Markov

Last week all blogs were filled with information about announcements of iPhone on CES. According to the article at Time.com, Apple did a lot of work about this device, and for the last 2 years we heard a lot of rumours about this gadget. Opinions are very different as all about what Apple creates (Think different?, Right). Anyway I’m anxious to see it available in our cellphone stores, and first of all for our development team. As the media described, software for the device is based on MacOS , which we, of course, can support. The official resource for developers, Developer.apple.com, is still missing important information about iPhone, but I suppose it will be available soon and we’ll have a chance to widen our experience and create something for this platform.

"Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development" by HireRussians

Written by Sibers CEO Serge Markov

Martin Fowler, “author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development” described his experience with offshore development and using agile practices, which we apply in most our projects, as follows:

“For the last four years ThoughtWorks has operated a lab in Bangalore India to support our software development projects in North America and Europe. Traditional approaches to offshore development are based on plan-driven methodologies, but we are very firmly in the agile camp. Here I discuss our experiences and lessons learned in doing offshore agile development. So far we’ve discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate.” (see the article)

Let me express my opinion about practices he described

Use Continuous Integration to Avoid Integration Headaches

When development force is involved on both parts, we propose to use one repository for code base – and make daily builds. Unfortunately, some day one side can discover very large changes there (like we found getting back to work a few days ago). Getting small and manageable updates is vital!

Have Each Site Send Ambassadors to the Other Sites

We haven’t used much this practice here in Sibers, but at one my previous jobs (for CFT Inc) it worked nicely: we spent several weeks to get things resolved remotely and then found a solution by sending a small team to the customer site. Communicating face to face with several stakeholders we could find the solution in terms of hours.

Use Contact Visits to build trust

We always welcome our prospective or current customers at our headquarters here, in Russia. If it causes some trouble to get a Russian visa, it’s possible to meet with us in a visa-free country (like Turkey or Kyrgyzstan, where we have our partner company KG United).

Don’t Underestimate the Culture Change

Culture really matters! Fortunately, Russian world is much closer to the Western one than the latter to that of India or other Asian countries. At least you won’t face a culture shock with us.

Use wikis to contain common information

We do extensively use WiKi’s for our internal KnowledgeBase, and several our projects also use this practice, which proved to be quite efficient. Suppose we need to make it permanent in all the projects.

Use Test Scripts to Help Understand the Requirements

Our QA team has great abilities to automate acceptance testing via tools, but also for several large projects the development team creates a big set of test-units written by themselves just to cover all possible behaviors of the application.

Use Regular Builds to Get Feedback on Functionality

I do appreciate this practice very much. In 20% of projects we make daily builds, in 60% we make builds or provide online demo 2-3 times per week (but still send daily email updates and do chat with customers). It really works!

Use Regular Short Status Meetings

Usually this practice is applied through daily chats via IM – ICQ, AOL, MSN, Google Talk, Skype or any other preferable to the customer way.

Use Short Iterations

Depending on the project size, our iteration varies from a day to week.

Use an Iteration Planning Meeting that’s Tailored for Remote Sites

Every our project starts with an “architecture” meeting where the whole team is involved: CTO (who made the estimate), Sales Manager (who led a preliminary discussion with the customer), Project Manager, Senior Developer or Team Leader (with clue on technology to be used), Developer and QA Engineer (to ensure quality questions resolved from the start).

When Moving a Code Base, Bug Fixing Makes a Good Start

We make a lot of projects with existing code, and “a few changes” very often transform into large development as we begin with fixing existing bugs.

Separate teams by functionality not activity

In several large projects we found that it’s better to get a whole team involved into the whole architectural part – both with analysis, design, development and QA. In such a way the team understands the whole concept of the project and works more efficiently.

Expect to need more documents.

Agree! At least one practice describes this rule: when our sale process is finished, we do require Sales Manager to prepare a Work Statement document with all known details about the project described. This document is the base for work on the project and a good example that things should be written down.

Get multiple communication modes working early

Our PMs do use several methods described bellow. Probably it’s kind of duplicating information,  but it’s necessary when you cannot “look into your customer’s eyes”:

• Oral – we have 1-800 number and conference calls software based on Asterisk and VOIP technologies
• Quick chats – IM’s as described
• Email – daily updates, reports, financial information
• Bug-tracking – bugzilla, Mantisse or whatever preferred by customers

So sum it up:

• In most cases HireRussians and Sibers follow these practices, which are of course not “rocket-science” but the essence of everyday software development experience.

What Russian Programmers do on New Year holidays!

Posted by Sibers CEO Serge Markov

Many of our customers and partners from western world may be very curious about our long holidays and come with the question ‘What do Russian Programmers do on New Year holidays?’ That’s right, we do celebrate much more about New Year and less about Christmas. We had 10 days off and usually I (and our other people) spend this on:

• Eating – climate here in Siberia is less comfortable, and when you can eat only an apple for dinner if you live in India, for getting survive in -20-30 C you should get much more calories and better with protein. So usual menu for New Year Celebration consists of many dishes:
  • salads with lot of mayonnaise, most popular is ‘Olivye’ or ‘Zimniy (Winter-made)
  • appetizers, smoked sausages, different beef snacks, jellied snacks and so on
  • hot dishes – usually with pork, duck or other beef with potatoes baked with sauces
  • other dishes, which depends on … but usually the number of them is much bigger than people can eat :)
• Drinking – I suppose Vodka is a preferred drink, because it supports us with a lot of energy :) Also usually at the moment New Year comes we open a bottle of champagne-like beverages.
• Traveling – People usually do two previous items while visiting their parents or relatives, and the more relatives you have, the more you need to consume. You begin in your city and have enough time to visit remote relatives. I took a trip to Omsk-city (about 600 km away from Novosibirsk) and each time I was asked why I didn’t eat (Don’t you like this nice dish?). FYI, the cost for a rail-road trip for period from 30 Dec to 10 Jan is about twice its usual price.
• Practicing Winter Sports – When I got all the previous I started thinking how I could apply my power in a ‘good’ direction. As far as winter is the longest time of year here (snow stays from Oct till May), there are some winter sports available in our area:
  • Cross-country skiing – is probably the most popular sport here. You should know that in the Russian army they have a special course how to use skis in cross-country;
  • Mountain Skis or Snowboard – this is a modern sport here, but it’s getting popular. We have several small resorts (up to 100 m high) in the city area and some larger in 100-200 km range. For instance, I visited a newly opened Jurmanka resort today (with about a 350 m high mountain). Most known places are Sheregesh in the Shoria Mountains (650 km from Novosibirsk) and Belokurikha in the Altai Mountains (about 550 km). In winter there are numerous tours organized to these places.
  • Winter Skating – very popular in city area – e.g. at least 3 rinks are available in the city region where most of our team live. You should know that Russian figure skaters are the best like Russians software developers:)
  • Ice Hockey and Bandy – Hockey with a ball – these two require much more experience;
  • Biathlon – I do prefer watching this very interesting sport on TV, but we have a large stadium for biathlon here in Novosibirsk.
  • Fishing – we have a large Ob’ sea near here.
  • Hunting – it’s usual in the countryside. Some people consider it a kind of entertainment, other people are used to using guns to get food.
• Your comments are welcome here… please do not hesitate to comment on how you did on these wonderful holidays.

E.g., on 7 January we celebrate Christmas (according to the Orthodox church calendar), and on 8 Jan we are coming back to work – after full rest having power and desire to solve our customers’ tasks.