Agile Nearshoring Solutions

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

Values, Focus, Transparency and fast results.

Agile Processes

www.agile-nearshoring.com

Agile Values – Agile Manifest

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.


Bildquelle: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/system/hidden_asset/file/26/scrum1280x1024.png
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, which means you can copy, distribute, and display the images including in commercial
and derivative works as long as you include attribution to Mountain Goat Software.


Scrum Values

 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)

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

Nearshoring


Definition: Nearshoring
Europe eg. Asia
Germany eg. Ukraine eg. Vietnam
Same building /
location.

Inhouse Onshore Nearshore Offshore

Onsite

Continent own Resources of a
resources external provider
Country

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

Inhouse Offshore Nearshore
Costs are well known Significant cost reduction Significant cost reduction
possible: Low labor costs, high possible: Low labor costs,
transaction costs medium transaction costs
Everybody shares similar Cultural differences exist Less cultural differences, team
Culture (cultural backgrounds) culture usually dominates

Interaction: Developer teams Developer teams are far away Developer teams usually can be
work on-site or close by and visiting them requires a lot visited in one business day
of time and money (including return flight)

Same Rhythm Some regions do have huge time Only minor time zone
zone differences, coordination differences, same rhythm can be
gets more complicated established

Less Flexibility because all High flexibility, high variance of Highly flexible for standard
resources are fully allocated to quality of the assigned technologies
save costs developers

Everybody speaks the same Depending on country English is English, Russian, some German,
Language (...) well established as second French
language
Legal security Depending on the country there Legal systems are quite similar,
might be huge legal ramifications sometimes under EU law


Nearshore Outsourcing
 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


Nearshoring – What to take into
consideration?
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

Agile Methods and Nearshoring
– does it work?
Yes of course!


Risks
“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.


Horror Stories
“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.”


Success Factors
 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.


Best Practices & Tools
 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
Kommunikation/Collaboration Knowledge database
 VoIP, Skype, Netviewer, WebEx,  Wiki, Twiki, Confluence
Instant Messaging, internal Twitter,
Video Conferences, Security tools Configurations Management
 SVN, CVS, Maven, Jam
Project Management
 Jira, MS Project, XPlanner (Agile), Continuous Integration
ScrumWorks (Agile),
TargetProcess(Agile), tinypm (agile),  Hudson, Quickbuild
ExtremePlanner, IceScrum,
SilverCatalyst (agile), Excel , Software Quality
Agilefant , Agilo, VersionOne  UnitTest, Selenium, Metrics, Code
Style checker…
Requirements Engineering
 Doors, IBM Rational Requisite PRO, Bug Tracking
Enterprise Architect, Excel Liste  Jira, Bugzilla


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


Contact
 More information available on our web site
 www.agile-nearshoring.com

 Get in contact with us for discussing further details:
 info@agile-nearshoring.com
 0721-754069-85

Agile Nearshoring Solutions

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Agile Nearshoring Solutions

Similar to Agile Nearshoring Solutions (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Agile Nearshoring Solutions