Agile Nearshoring Solutions

Agile-Nearshoring.com Agile Teams 2 Build Your Dreams!

Agile Processes

Values, Focus, Transparency and fast results.

www.agile-nearshoring.com

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Agile Values – Agile Manifest


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Openess (eg. in the retrospective)

Respect (eg. trust the team)

Focus (eg. team: Focus on the sprint goal, get not

distracted. PO: Select the most important stories.)

Commitment (eg. Keep your promises)

Courage (eg. Have the courage to decide, not to accept

bad work, keeping your estimate)

Scrum Values


Nearshoring

Time to market, more flexibility, cost reductions and external know how


Definition: Nearshoring

Onsite

Inhouse Onshore Nearshore Offshore

Germany

Europe

eg. Ukraine

eg. Asia

eg. Vietnam

Source: IT-Near- und Offshoring in der Praxis (Nicklisch, Borchers, Krick, Rucks), Page 5

Continent

Country

own resources

Resources of a external provider

Same building / location.

Inhouse Offshore Nearshore Costs are well known Significant cost reduction

possible: Low labor costs, high transaction costs

Significant cost reduction possible: Low labor costs, medium transaction costs

Everybody shares similar

Culture (cultural backgrounds)

Cultural differences exist Less cultural differences, team culture usually dominates

Interaction: Developer teams work on-site or close by

Developer teams are far away and visiting them requires a lot of time and money

Developer teams usually can be visited in one business day (including return flight)

Same Rhythm Some regions do have huge time zone differences, coordination gets more complicated

Only minor time zone differences, same rhythm can be established

Less Flexibility because all resources are fully allocated to save costs

High flexibility, high variance of quality of the assigned developers

Highly flexible for standard technologies

Everybody speaks the same

Language (...)

Depending on country English is well established as second language

English, Russian, some German, French

Legal security Depending on the country there might be huge legal ramifications

Legal systems are quite similar, sometimes under EU law


Reducing Time to Market

Flexible developer resources with special skills

Significant Cost reduction possible, risks shared

Very good Education and know how

Only minor Cultural differences

Good language skills, English as second language

Experienced providers, customers from the US

Success rate using Nearshoring is higher then with Offshoring

Nearshore Outsourcing


WHAT: Outsource the right tasks and processes Not every project and component can be successfully outsourced. Some issues to take into consideration:

Data privacy and intellectual property (Data and know how)

Degree of specialization & Dependencies between software systems and interfaces

Coordination effort

WHO: Chose the right partner For the decission whether distributed development is possible the following issues should be taken into account:

Know how of the development team & Experience and willingness to work based on agile principles

Communication: Speaking the same language and allow intensiv cooperation between teams

Compatibiity between Processes of customer and provider (dev team)

Legal security: Minimize legal risks

HOW: Be prepared and gain experience Before starting there should be project plan and a vision how to work together

Be well prepared before starting a major project.

Start with a Pilot project - Gain experience and learn from that

Nearshoring – What to take into consideration?

Agile Methods and Nearshoring – does it work?

Yes of course!


“Outsourcing, when not managed properly, can be a dangerous and dare I say, deadly business. There are plenty of well documented near death experiences of outsourcing initiatives that ended in complete disaster fo both parties.”

Nick Krym, Pragmatic Outsourcing

Risks


No real partnership If one side dominates the relationship problems will arise quickly.

Communication problems Missing open communication is a major risk. Language barriers.

Interpretation of „Agile“ Tranferring the agile values and principles to the project reality. A lot of experience is required!

Dependency on the service provider Absolut dependency should be avoided since you may lose flexibility

Assembling the Team / Team Members A „bad“ team can‘t meet the expectations. Invest into senior members.

Cost increases & Attrition rates Missing transparency of costs, wrong assumtions and high attrition rates are major risks.

The overal costs can be higher as expected due to process costs (communication, management) and lower productivity.

Law & Contract Risks must be shared equally.

Software Engineering Risks Even cheap rubbish is too expensive to buy.

Risks


“I stopped a development project by a team of five ‘very senior’ offshore engineers after 3 months due to quality issues. Two months later the project was completed by one in-house resource.”


“We stopped a development project being delivered by an offshore senior developer and several mid-level ones due to quality and productivity issues. A single mid-level in-house developer later delivered the project with oversight from a senior developer in less time than it took us to ramp up the team in Bangalore.”


Horror Stories


Partnership Relationship between Customer and Provider is like a marriage

Business case exist, responsibilities are clarified

Openness & Trust

Communication Continuous open communication

Close customer interaction, customer is available for answering questions

Focus & Reduced Complexity

Engineering Practices Using industry best practices and standards, getting things done

Unit testing / Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Configuration and Release Management

Agile Values and Processes are used in daily work

Minimizing Risks Short iterations with usable increments, reviews with the customer. Customer gets

business value (usable software) while the project is running.

Success Factors


Visits / Co-Locating At least key players must know each other in person and have met

several times. This helps creating trust. The more meetings in real – the better the results (worth the

investment of time and money) Hint: Meetings could and should include having some fun together.

Daily Meetings (Scrum Daily) and ongoing communication Video Conferencing, Shared Desktop Instant Messaging Project Management Tools

Strong customer involvement Transparency instead of obfuscation Customer is able to really manage the project

Best Practices & Tools


Best Practices & Tools

Kommunikation/Collaboration VoIP, Skype, Netviewer, WebEx,

Instant Messaging, internal Twitter, Video Conferences, Security tools

Project Management

Jira, MS Project, XPlanner (Agile), ScrumWorks (Agile), TargetProcess(Agile), tinypm (agile), ExtremePlanner, IceScrum, SilverCatalyst (agile), Excel , Agilefant , Agilo, VersionOne

Requirements Engineering

Doors, IBM Rational Requisite PRO, Enterprise Architect, Excel Liste

Knowledge database Wiki, Twiki, Confluence

Configurations Management SVN, CVS, Maven, Jam

Continuous Integration Hudson, Quickbuild

Software Quality UnitTest, Selenium, Metrics, Code

Style checker… Bug Tracking Jira, Bugzilla


Focus on Communication Same time zone: Direct Communication (synchronous) possible, instant Feedback Communication is a core practice (Focus) for agile methods

Responsibility Agile Methods based on sharing same culture and values Taking responsibility encouraged by agile values

Creating Trust by having Transparency Nearshore location simplify visits – important for better transparency and building trust Short cycles (iterations) result in usable software increments Agile methods are based on transparency : Important for all distributed projects.

Focus on Quality Higher quality to fast Feedback Using modern engineering practices (XP, TDD, ...)

Experience A lot of providers are very experienced with working in distributed projects. Scrum is used a lot by Nearshoring providers, XP is well known, too

http://www.agilerussia.ru/ http://scrumtrek.ru/ http://www.agiledev.ru http://www.agilebelarus.org http://www.agileukraine.org/ http://www.scrumguides.com/ http://agileee.org/

Agile Methods and Nearshoring are a perfect match because ...

http://www.agilerussia.ru/

http://scrumtrek.ru/

http://www.agiledev.ru/

http://www.agilebelarus.org/

http://www.agileukraine.org/

http://www.scrumguides.com/

http://agileee.org/

http://agileee.org/


More information available on our web site


Get in contact with us for discussing further details:

[email protected]

0721-754069-85

Contact

http://www.agile-nearshoring.com/

