Acism is the pioneer in the new age model of crowdsourcing software development. This model is better suited to the “new normal” fuelled by the pandemic and the lockdowns. In addition to Acism’s own team, the community of freelancers nurtured by Acism can contribute to software development projects in various roles. With a remote working possibility, that improves our reach and our choice of contributors 100X, and makes the software development process highly scalable.
Key Drivers
- Remote working was forced on an unprecedented scale during the pandemic. Both employers and employees realized first hand that while there are some challenges, there are some great benefits too. As long as the challenges can be mitigated, remote working is seen as a great alternative to the traditional way of working.
- The cost of hiring tech talent has reached insane levels. Small companies who have neither the reserves nor high paying clients had to shut shops because they could not retain their workforce. A way to enroll contributors beyond the conventionally available tech talent is better. Our crowdsourcing model offers it, as it enables making use of contributors even from the remotest corners and those who cannot be available continuously during standard office hours.
- The attrition is also quite high in the software industry. To mitigate the project risk, you need a clean Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) where the work items are small and measurable; and further a way to work which is not highly sensitive to continuity of resources. Both these considerations are the cornerstones of our crowdsourcing model.
The Mechanism: Enhanced Software Development Process
The enhanced software development process is captured in the following process flow diagram (courtesy: 10Xofy whitepaper). It has some activities borrowed from the conventional process (light blue), and others that are tweaked using Xsemble (light purple). Within each activity, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is clean and manageable, in the sense that one could assign fairly isolated tasks at individual level. This creates terrific flexibility of assigning and re-assigning work.
The process can be used as a part of waterfall or various agile methodologies. The freelancers’ community is an engine to execute this process to deliver a project.
In some cases, the client may themselves want to retain certain activities to themselves. Such permutations and combinations are made easy because of the flexibility of the process. This is explained further in our buffet menu blog post.
Benefits to Projects
- The projects have an huge pool of manpower to tap into, limited only by the availability of the community members. The choice lets you optimize in terms of skill and expertise on one side, and cost on the other.
- A programmer can become productive is no time, as the need to understand a gigantic codebase is absent. It is therefore easy to get more programmers onboard to deliver critical timelines.
- The enhanced software development process brings unprecedented transparency to software development. It is useful for tracking and course-corrections.
- The projects get executed at optimum cost. One does not get paid for rejected work. Contrast this with team members in traditional project teams who are billed to the project although their deliveries may not be good. Further impact on cost savings due to the use of Xsemble technology is covered in Xsemble’s introductory slide deck found on xsemble.com.
- There is an built-in fault-tolerance and resilience in this model. When someone does not deliver up to the expectations, their work gets rejected. They may be given a chance to improve it and re-submit, or the work may get assigned to someone else. This makes sure that individual lack of skills or professionalism will affect the work least, and a reliable output will come out.
- Your IPR can be protected much better when individuals located across different geographies work on parts of the project.
- Your software is highly enhanceable and maintainable for life, as it is made up of tiny components. A change can be planned visually with the help of the Xsemble flow diagram to affect certain components or needing new components, and then programmers will need to work only on those components. Again, it does not matter if these are completely new programmers, because the learning curve for a tiny component is negligible.
Let’s Get Started
If you have a software project, you can approach us at sales@acism.com for those.
You are also welcome to attend a community meet to get a first-hand feel. Register here to attend the upcoming community meet.