Offshoring seems contrary to Agile principles. Can it work?

Rapid iterations. Short cycles. Feedback from the market. Real-time conversations. Fast course corrections.

These are some of the many promises of Agile software development. It’s tough enough to make these concepts work well in a company where the development teams are colocated. It’s a completely different challenge making Agile work with offshore teams — especially third party vendors. The obstacles to agile collaboration with offshore vendors are many:

• Vendor procurement is often based on fixed time and scope initiatives
• Vendor business models dictate success as “works as spec’ed” not “met customer needs”
• Time zone differences make real-time conversation challenging
• Cultural differences give the illusion of conflict resolution or no conflicts at all
• Incentive structures for the in-house teams differ from the vendor’s
• …and many more

• Have each side send ambassadors to the other sites to ensure there is representations for each team at each location.
• Don’t underestimate the culture change required to implement Agile. The freedom to question your managers’ directions is not universal. Ensure this is discussed.
• Separate teams by functionality (e.g., features, workflows) not activity (e.g., development, QA, etc). In other words, build self-sufficient teams at each site (or as close to that as possible) so that cross-ocean dependencies are reduced.
• Expect to need more documents. There’s no way around it. Reduced real-time communication means a greater reliance on written communication. These can be digital documents held in wikis and other collaboration tools but the teams will rely much more heavily on them than in colocated situations.