« Is JavaScript becoming a Ruby killer? | Main | Mainframed? »
The secrets of doing agile offshoring with succes
By Therese Hansen | September 23, 2008
In this interview from JAOO 2007 Jeff Sutherland and Serge Beaumont discuss the secrets of doing offshore development in an agile way based on their real life experience. Jeff Sutherland, Scrum co-founder, has been helping others to do agile the right way and Serge Beaumont works for Xebia, a company with an agile team divided between the US and India.
Agile offshoring is not easy but Serge and Jeff suggest some best practices based on their experience. Part of the answer is communication and in Serges team they communicate through several channels.
- The team members meet in real life. People travel from India to the Netherlands and the other way. When team members have met in real life it eases the virtual communication in the future because they know each others style of communication.
- Daily standup in a distributed fasion with a microphone, webcam and Skype. Also experimenting with multimedia; higher quality video and electronic whiteboards.
Working locally the team establishes its velocity and when distributed, the team strives to keep that velocity. In the case where the team fails to do that, the Scrum master will take action and maybe even change location in an effort to try to fix the problem.
The product owners will not be distributed, but will initially be colocated with the architects and the Scrum masters to get direct communication.
This was just some of the suggestions – watch the video for the whole story.
August 12th, 2010 at 4:19 am
[...] Video entrevista con Jeff Sutherland, fundador de Scrum: http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/09/23/the-secrets-of-doing-agile-offshoring-with-succes/ [...]