A trend in offshore software application development is moving to an offshore setting. The process appears to be opposed to agile development in several ways. For a start it goes against the notion of physical nearness, since through definition of other shore service providers are a long way away. Second, most offshore vendors favor the plan-driven approach wherein detailed designs or requirements are sent offshore to be done. The question in the process would be the absolute requirements that could be used to succeed in the offshore app development process.
The three absolute requirements include the following:
1. Use of continuous integration to avoid integration problems. Everyone has been happy with how well this works. The main benefit of this is that issue that plagues other groups when it comes to integration just does not happen to those using it. The continuous integration and test process flushes out a lot of issues very fast, thus they could be fixed before they become difficult to find. The process requires good connectivity, often, better connectivity than people are used to.
2. Each site should send ambassadors to other sites. One of the advantages of a business-oriented ambassador on the offshore team is it helps provide business context to the offshore vendor. An integral part of the job of the ambassador is to communicate gossip. On any given project, there is plenty of informal communication. While most of this is not important, some are and the trouble is that one could never tell which is which. Thus, part of the ambassador’s job is to community lots of tidbits which do not look important enough for more formal communication channels. These professionals are an integral part of trust building and gelling across the wire. As a result, it is important to send them out as early as possible in the task.
Contact visits could build trust and the ambassadors are semi-permanent people who would spend several months in the other area or location. There are two kinds of contact visits, the seeding visits that occur early in the project and meant to establish relationships. The other one, the maintaining visits are what helps keep the relationship going.
3. Business interests should be aligned. There are a lot of companies that reward late projects and punish the early ones. This is of course not intentional. When projects were late, they would respond through the creation of special incentives, adding people to the task and boosting the project visibility. When a project does well, they would pull people off to fight other fires, take the best ones away from the project leader to work on other tasks, and then management would stop attending project review meetings. When working when an outsourcing vendor, if a firm does not figure out their model and how they get paid, it is the same a playing a poker blindfolded. A lot of organizations build a model based on rotating junior people via their company on standard projects. One of the most difficult problems in assessing professional job productivity is determining quality impact.
The three absolute requirements include the following:
1. Use of continuous integration to avoid integration problems. Everyone has been happy with how well this works. The main benefit of this is that issue that plagues other groups when it comes to integration just does not happen to those using it. The continuous integration and test process flushes out a lot of issues very fast, thus they could be fixed before they become difficult to find. The process requires good connectivity, often, better connectivity than people are used to.
2. Each site should send ambassadors to other sites. One of the advantages of a business-oriented ambassador on the offshore team is it helps provide business context to the offshore vendor. An integral part of the job of the ambassador is to communicate gossip. On any given project, there is plenty of informal communication. While most of this is not important, some are and the trouble is that one could never tell which is which. Thus, part of the ambassador’s job is to community lots of tidbits which do not look important enough for more formal communication channels. These professionals are an integral part of trust building and gelling across the wire. As a result, it is important to send them out as early as possible in the task.
Contact visits could build trust and the ambassadors are semi-permanent people who would spend several months in the other area or location. There are two kinds of contact visits, the seeding visits that occur early in the project and meant to establish relationships. The other one, the maintaining visits are what helps keep the relationship going.
3. Business interests should be aligned. There are a lot of companies that reward late projects and punish the early ones. This is of course not intentional. When projects were late, they would respond through the creation of special incentives, adding people to the task and boosting the project visibility. When a project does well, they would pull people off to fight other fires, take the best ones away from the project leader to work on other tasks, and then management would stop attending project review meetings. When working when an outsourcing vendor, if a firm does not figure out their model and how they get paid, it is the same a playing a poker blindfolded. A lot of organizations build a model based on rotating junior people via their company on standard projects. One of the most difficult problems in assessing professional job productivity is determining quality impact.