Software Sweatshop

The Chicago Quality Assurance Association had an interesting lecture at the Willis Sears Tower on March 24th titled "Building and Managing Successful Offshore Teams Using Scrum" There is a big difference between offshoring internal IT projects versus offshoring commercial product development, but some of the same lessons still apply. In the case of commercial work, there needs to be a vested interest on both sides to adhere to the constant communication... doing this offshore is tricky. The main problem with traditional waterfall development (especially when working with offshore resources) is that problems are hidden and they only appear at the tail end of the project. It's no wonder that almost 65% of software projects fail! How many horror stories have you heard about offshore IT projects over budget, out of scope, or over due because no one knew what the offshore team was really doing?

Benefits of Distributed Agile Development

1). Lots visibility and transparency

2). Were able to deliver work fast enough with acceptable quality

3). Offshore team enjoyed agile/scrum, especially the intense collaboration with each other

4). Not one "onshore" resource lost their job

How To Do Distributed Scrum

1). The most important thing is that they took the attitude that outsourcing would succeed; no matter what

2). They did a lot of risk analysis and thought of everything that could go wrong: communication, source code violations, connectivity, etc.

3). Asked their friends and they said "don't do it"

4). Lots of cultural awareness training... learned about the Indian head bob

5). Refined the product backlog: for the first sprint they had 2 guys at a time in the US. Hires were all fresh off the street, not much experience

6). Created a sprint planning calendar

7). Trained Indian team in scrum

8). Lots of product training in the design, architecture, etc.

9). Held both teams to the same standard

10). Created team bios on MS Sharepoint

11). VSS was a problem so they had to merge code every month, it was a huge pain

12). Made sure user stories are well defined; good user story should be well developed

Challenges with Distributed Agile Development

1). Had to have a few conversations about underpromising and overdelivering with their offshore team because they took too many user stories and then ended up failing at the end of the sprint. this is a common issue with Indian developers. The desire to please is common in Indian culture, so it has to be tempered with a sense of creating realistic expectations.

2). Because of the problems with Visual Source Safe, they didn't see offshore code till after the monthly merge... code review revealed problems which they had to fix

For more on agile offshore software development listen to Andy Singleton's podcast on managing distributed agile software developmentand read Martin Fowler's article about offshore agile software development

Also check out Tackling Offshore Agile Development and Making Offshore Agile Work