7 Tips to Offshore Agile Development

You can’t offshore agile.

That had largely been the accepted wisdom in corporate IT since the iterative development approach was introduced more than a decade ago.

Distance, it seemed, would only make agile methods of close-working, collaborative teams, self-governance, and rapid, time-boxed development more difficult.

According to a September 2012 Forrester report on “rightsourcing” agile development, “geographically distributed teams add complexity [to agile development], making it harder for teams to communicate the flow of work, backlog status, and issues and impediments.”

But over the last few years, many niche offshore providers have been quietly developing their agile development offerings-several exclusively supporting such incremental software development. And some IT leaders are embracing the offshore model.

“I know of a few successful examples of agile development with offshore teams,” says Cindy Carpenter, vice president of research at outsourcing analyst firm HfS Research. “One experienced offshore agile project manager told me [that while] the usual view is that you must be in the same room to do agile, his view is that if you’re not in the same room, the best way to do software development is with agile methodology.”

Here are seven tips to make it work…

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