Organizations delivering offshore software development services have traditionally focused on CMMI framework to deliver quality software. With agile methodologies gaining more wide spread acceptance, such organizations cannot stay away from them. There are concerns about combining agile methodologies with offshoring. There are also concerns about mismatch of agile methodologies with CMMI framework.In this paper we have looked at the problem from the perspective of an offshore software development organization and recounted our experience in adopting agile methodology in executing fixed price agile project. The challenges we have faced comes from three different dimensions. First is to address the issue of having an agile team split across two different countries. The second is to execute the agile project within the framework prescribed under CMMI. Here the challenge is not only to address the actual gap between CMMI and agile methodologies but also to address the perceived shortcomings of agile methodologies. The third dimension is to execute the project as a fixed price one where the requirement is not frozen at the beginning of the project.We have listed the challenges that we have faced. They can be categorized under requirements management, contract management, team management, distributed working, when to design, role of a specialist, testing challenges and CMMI adherence. The different solutions tried and the levels of success in overcoming them have also been included. Our experience indicates that agile methodologies can coexist with offshoring and CMMI framework.

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) address different aspects of building flexible business applications with rich user interfaces. Since AJAX is for the client side programming and SOA is for the server side programming, they complement each other. Optimal partitioning of an application between multiple machines has always been a challenge. Not much work has been done to establish best practices in arriving at how an SOA based AJAX application can be partitioned. In this paper we describe our experiences of partitioning an insurance underwriting application between client and server for performance optimization. We also outline a set of design guidelines and a four step methodology for achieving the same.

In this paper an artificial delay based impedance controller is proposed for robotic manipulators with uncertainty in dynamics. The control law unites the time delayed estimation (TDE) framework with a second order switching controller of super twisting algorithm (STA) type via a novel generalized filtered tracking error (GFTE). While time delayed estimation framework eliminates the need for accurate modelling of robot dynamics by estimating the uncertain robot dynamics and interaction forces from immediate past data of state and control effort, the second order switching control law in the outer loop provides robustness against the time delayed estimation (TDE) error that arises due to approximation of the manipulator dynamics. Thus, the proposed control law tries to establish a desired impedance model between the robot end effector variables i.e. force and motion in presence of uncertainties, both when it is encountering smooth contact forces and during free motion. Simulation results for a two link manipulator using the proposed controller along with convergence analysis are shown to validate the proposition.