Onshore and offshore outsourcing with agility: Lessons learned

Abstract

This chapter reflects on case study based an agile distributed project that ran for approximately three years (from spring 2003 to spring 2006). The project involved (a) a customer organization with key personnel distributed across the US, developing an application with rapidly changing requirements; (b) onshore consultants with expertise in project management, development processes, offshoring, and relevant technologies; and (c) an external offsite development team in a CMM-5 organization in southern India. This chapter is based on surveys and discussions with multiple participants. The several years since the project was completed allow greater perspective on both the strengths and weaknesses, since the participants can reflect on the entire life of the project, and compare it to subsequent experiences. Our findings emphasize the potential for agile project management in distributed software development, and the importance of people and interactions, taking many small steps to find and correct errors, and matching the structures of the project and product to support implementation of agility. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.