“You cannot offshore agile development”
This is one of the most common misconceptions about agile
There are many reasons companies avoid off-shoring their agile development, some of them being :
- They have tried offshoring with classic partners before and failed
- They believe highly complex projects need to be done closer to home
- They feel that geographically distributed teams add complexity, making it harder for the teams to communicate the flow of work, backlog status, issues and impediments.
Yet, as the demand for agile development is growing by day, and the IT world is undergoing a unidirectional shift, many people find themselves re-thinking ‘agile offshoring’. After all, time and money has been and will be precious and nobody wants to be patient when it comes to its delivery.
It is important to understand the dynamics of the organization, and the team structure to be able to establish the right delivery practices for distributed agile teams.
There are many flavors of distributed agile team structure:
- Product owner at onshore, development team at offshore
- Product owner at onshore and multiple development teams at two or more locations
- A complex model like product owner that travels between end user locations and development team is distributed across time zones
Such teams can work in perfect harmony by following some best practices that include:
- Appoint product owner’s proxy at remote location
- Set-up feature teams in each location
- Set-up centralized continuous integration server
- Set-up technical monitoring tools
- Have centralized backlog management process
- Use collaborative project management tools
- Conduct scrum-of-scrum meeting
- Share retrospective between locations
- Facilitate time-zone overlap between locations
- Extensive use of and video, voice and live chats
To learn more about Agile off-shoring, here is :
A complete downloadable checklist on Agile offshore product development best practices
Also check out the webinar below and learn how you can make agile work with your offshore teams.
Author
Co-founder of People10, a 'total agile' software development and consulting company.