Agile Offshoring in Practice

How is Agile offshoring done in practice? Julian Bass studied seven different companies doing off-shoring London-Bengaluru. He had expected that the companies would have adapted a continuum of practices from Scrum and XP.

Findings about Agile Offshoring

A picture of a team of Indian engineers.

A stereotypical view of a team of Indian agile offshoring engineers. By C. Frank Starmer. Used under a creative commons license. Click image for details.

To his surprise he found that this was not true. Instead, all of the companies had adopted scrum with the exception of iteration demos. All companies did enforce coding standards. This was not really related to agile practices. It was a corporate standard enforced regardless of agile. All companies also claimed that they had collective ownership of code. There were two projects which did pair programming and TDD; none of the others did. Finally, only one project / company had implemented any other XP practices, most notably Continuous Integration. So, is the cost of continuous integration too high for your agile offshoring project?

Continuous Integration for Agile Offshoring

There were two agile practices that I missed most. Only few of the agile offshoring project did iteration demos or continuous integration. Continuous integration requires a lot of work to setup and maintain. But the alternative, late and manual integration is so risky and complicated. Agile software development methods are very much about avoiding building up a debt of unfinished work. It is also about doing the most risky things first. Extreme programming has the right attitude about continuous integration. Regardless if you are in an agile offshoring project or not you should always do continuous integration. You do not need to do test driven development (TDD) to do CI. Just having a build running is enough to catch many errors.

Iteration Demos

Why did so few agile offshoring projects perform iteration demos? I have always found that iteration demos are really useful. They provide an opportunity to interact with the users. To gather feedback from the users. To make sure that they actually look at it before it is to late. This should be more, not less important in agile offshoring. When you are far from the user you should spend more time on iteration demos, not less. Be extreme, try doing it twice per iteration. I have tried and it really worked.