Sidebar: Staying In-house

Computerworld - As IT labor rates rise overseas and fall or remain constant in the U.S., the financial advantage of offshoring will shrink and more software development will be done in-house, predicts Network Services CIO Michael H. Hugos. And smart companies will adopt development practices that increase their productivity and make in-house alternatives still more attractive, he adds. Hugos says six core techniques -- he calls them the "skills of the game" -- are crucial for successful in-house development shops:

1. Joint application design for pooling the collective knowledge and ideas of business and technical people.
2. Process mapping for drawing out existing workflows and designing new ones.
3. Data modeling for defining the kinds and volumes of data that a system will handle.
4. System prototyping for modeling a system's user interface and its technical architecture to verify that it will work as expected.
5. Object-oriented design and programming for creating systems from predefined and reusable software components.
6. System testing and preparation for testing, de-bugging and fine-tuning a system and training the people who'll work with it.
Hugos isn't reticent when it comes to making claims about the benefits of the practices he has defined. "A miracle of increased productivity and customer satisfaction will occur when disciplined groups of developers take these skills to heart and apply them consistently and rigorously," he says.