I just returned from Chennai, India where I had the pleasure of working with a relatively small team of developers. We started working with them a year ago with the simple goal of getting one project completed for Business Exchange. Over the course of the year, we’ve tripled the size of the team and now have several teams practicing agile development similar to how we do it on site.Myth: You can’t practice agile development offshoreMany managers will tell you that offshore development is best practiced when you can develop a really good spec of requirements. But I assure you, we’re not the only group practicing offshore agile development and by no means experts at this practice. Some offshore service vendors now specialize in agile and the big IT vendors have established practices. Bottom line, it’s totally feasible to do agile offshore, but it takes time to establish the process.

Getting Started

The first thing we recognized is that when you practice agile, it establishes and formalizes the timing of your release cycle. We try (and almost always succeed) releasing at the end of each iteration. So for our offshore teams, we either needed to align their releases with our onshore teams practicing agile, or we needed to establish a separate release cycle. The latter just wouldn’t work because of product dependencies between the on and offshore teams. So very quickly we needed our offshore team to practice iterative development and release cycles.

From Iterative to Agile

Once we optimized around iterative delivery, there was a collective effort between members of my team as well as our offshore partner to move to agile development. Some key steps in making this work:

• Invest in basic training. If you’re practicing SCRUM, make key members of your teams have some basic training.
• When recruiting new members, look for people with experience on agile projects
• Make sure your offshore team members have some understanding of the business, product, and even competition before going agile.
• Whiteboards and stickies won’t cut it when you go offshore. You better have some maturity with an agile project tool before going offshore.
• Consider on site staffing needs, communication processes, and escalation processes to help establish the practice.
• Make sure you schedule face to face visits. We had one member of my staff work offshore for three weeks. We also brought one of our offshore developers come on site for a few weeks.

Finally, agile development is always a work in progress. Once you have agile working, make sure your process improvement considers how to improve both on site and offshore delivery.