Using an agile software process with offshore development

Abstract

For the last four years ThoughtWorks has operated a lab in Bangalore India to support our software development projects in North America and Europe. Traditional approaches to offshore development are based on plan-driven methodologies, but we are very firmly in the agile camp. Here I discuss our experiences and lessons learned in doing offshore agile development. So far we've discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate. (Although this article was last updated in 2006, I our visited our offshore work in 2011 and found the lessons to still be relevant and thus the article did not need a further significant revision.)