Shrinking product life cycles and volatility of requirements characterize software product development today. In the ISV world where innovation and the accompanied risks demand a more agile and iterative approach to delivering software, a methodologist needs to adapt from the many models of development and define a best-of-breed approach. Offshore development further poses challenges to the ISVs as the remote development team largely works in a different time zone and there is a need to create continuous visibility into software developed by the offshore team. At Patni, we have adopted a robust software development methodology that addresses these challenges in a proactive manner. We also work closely with ISVs to seamlessly integrate our development processes with the one being followed by the client’s development team.

Patni PLUS™ Methodology for Delivery Excellence
Patni has put in years of software lifecycle management experience to form proprietary techniques for software development, maintenance and testing called the Patni PLUS™ Methodology for Delivery Excellence. As an ISO 9001 certified company Patni ensures that we deliver high quality, reliable and cost-effective IT services to customers globally. With this in mind the Patni PLUS™ Methodology has been framed to address all ISO 9001: 2000 and CMMI V 1.2 Level 5 requirements. Moreover, Patni PLUS™ also expresses our management's stated quality policy and describes the intentions and direction for achieving quality in offshore projects.

The methodology is based upon our principles of ensuring quality as an embedded aspect at every stage. It ensures collaboration across teams for large assignments while still providing the required flexibility to meet business priorities. The Patni PLUS™ Methodology also ensures the creation and utilization of knowledge assets throughout the lifecycle. On the whole our tried and tested process oriented methods ensure quality, performance and on-time delivery ensuring risk reduction for our clients.

Agile Development at Patni
For projects which are risk-laden, where requirements are not very well defined and / or early versions of workable software are critical for business success, we recommend a more adaptive approach.

We have created a methodology that borrows the engineering rigour from the CMM framework, combining it with the informality of agile models such as Extreme Programming, SCRUM and other variants. We have standardized on short delivery cycles and invested in key agile practices such as continuous code integration, working from a common code base, pair programming and test-driven development.

Agile and CMM
The Agile development methodology at Patni is further characterized by a set of measures and metrics that map well within some of the Key Result Areas (KRA) contained in the Capability Maturity Levels defined by SEI, thus making it possible to continually improve the process.