Recent Agile Offshore Software Development Methodology & Good Practices is very important to distant developers who has different locations. Most people may see it that Agile offshore software development is suitable altogether, since there is need for close communication and open culture is required between a developer and a client.
Conversely, it is difficult to combine distance and culture differences when dealing with people abroad, whether teammates or client. Now lets go in-dept in offshore outsourcing and agile development. Meanwhile, check out Hybrid Cloud Hosting Service: Uses & Best Practices found on our recent posts.
Agile Offshore Software Development Methodology & Best Practices
If you look at organisations that has different locations and geographically distributed staffs it is tougher to communicate the work flow status and problems (drawbacks). Nonetheless, lately several successful staffs have been able to prove that the use of an agile software process with offshore development is promising. Besides, if you put together all the benefits of subcontracting, you will notice that it comes with relief and good result. You cal also read Best Practices to Secure Your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure on this website.
However, when you finally decide to go offshore for outsourcing, the best approach to do software development with people far away is with the agile methodology. In the meantime, explanations has been made to show you the best practices and efficient methods of agile offshore software development.
Best practices of Agile offshoring software development
1. Helps with Close communication
First of all, Agile methodology supports regular brief meetings for an entire team of developers. For those organisations that manage offshore development teams, regular communications and meetings are very essential, helping team members to synchronize their work with one another.
Nonetheless, the major issues here is the differences in time zones. So it is important to plan the calls and meetings schedule accordingly, putting into consideration the local time of all the parties involved. We have mentioned Some Hybrid Cloud Security Risks Challenges and How to Fix it, feel free to check it out from the related articles.
For example, it has been discovered that the best time for calls and/or meetings when working with California clients from the U.S is 9-11 A.M. PST. This usually allows the developers to finish all their everyday jobs during the client’s night rest. The very next day, the team/clients are to get the report on work status so as to continue working without any form of disruptions.
Types of common Agile Offshore Software Development meetings
Scroll down so as to find three types of meetings that are most common for Agile offshore software development.
- Everyday stand-up meetings. These types of meetings are usually held in the morning hours usually from 9am and they last for about 15 to 20 minutes. In the course of the meeting, all team members must answer 3 questions. First, what task was done yesterday; secondly, what task is to be done today and thirdly what are the current difficulties faced when performing the daily task.
- Fast planning meetings for preparing the next move. Sprint goal and sprint backlog are.
- Issue planning meetings, on which release plans are formed. This is to say that release plans are in their turn further used for development of iteration plans.
2. Brief iterations
Brief iterations enables improved communication of requirements which comes with more accurate status reporting, positive and meaningful reviews with your clients. Furthermore, they help in simplifying development modifications a lot. As you may already know that it is tremendously vital for new startups. In Software development firms, almost all projects use iterations of one or two week’s interval. See Tips on how you can reduce cost for app development available on related posts.
3. Corporate coding principles and other stuff
In cooperate organisations, there are recommended principles used in agile offshore software development. They include; continuous integration, bug tracking, common coding standards, design patterns and a source-control server. As a matter of fact, these practices has become more significant with agile offshore software development teams since there may be little or no face to face contact at all. Therefore, it is opined that they should be applied to separated teams members more firmly than to local office staffs.
That being said, you have to ensure sure that you are working with the source code service, which permits both onsite and offshore team members to work seamlessly. Nevertheless, it important that you spend time to discover another source code control systems in case you’re stuck with one that does not perform very well in distant subcontracting.
With that in mind, you must also have more need for active collaboration tools when managing agile offshore software development teams, such as prototyping tools, wikis, issue tracking tools and so on.
4. Everything must be in Documentation
This section is very important when working with agile offshore software development teams. Documentation is very important so as to have a well-defined specifications of your product and services. I assure you that it is very vital to save details of all communications, plans, tasks, issues and solutions when working with agile offshore software development team.
In the light of this, please ensure that you spend a good amount of time to define your product and services requirements & specification. You should assign a project manager to each of your clients for this purpose, so that as soon as the project is completed, you can ensure 100% client satisfaction. Comparatively, this will also makes you and your team happy.
Keep in mind that all the changes to existing documentation is to be done in the work track changes mode. This will save you the stress of communicating directly to each team member what changes were made overtime. Else, ensure you have appropriately defined your version control system.
5. Use Sketchy Stories & Project Manager cases
Agile offshore software development involves more and more responsiveness to communicating needs. This is so since the risk of understanding the team in an incorrect way increases with the distance and culture differences between you.
Please make sure to have user stories that will give your offshore development team a concrete target to aim at even before starting an iteration.
We have seen organization who apply this technique with the help of a sketchy story prepared by the customer since this is when the most of right questions are asked. This will help to create use cases prepared by project managers based on this sketchy story. It has been discovered that this approach also helps both customers and project manager to actually understand the requirements of the job.
Agile offshore software development principles & Approach
Equally, the Agile approach is specifically valuable for managing offshore development projects. This approach is so because coding and testing in geographically dispersed locations requires a flexibility, prompt feedback and consistency in teamwork. We have a related topic on Hybrid Hosting Control Flexibility and Efficiency – Public & Private Cloud Hosting – open & read it. All things considered, not all common Agile practices have been seen to be fully sensible when working with dispersed team members. In the light of this, you have to ensure to adjust agile principles to the level you find suitable.
Searches related to Agile Offshore software Development
- offshore outsourcing and agile development
- agile offshore challenges
- offshoring agile
- agile software design
- what is agile teaming
- agile methodology onsite offshore model
- how to maintain quality in agile
- code check in agile
Conclusion of Agile offshore software development principles
In summary, Hybrid Cloud Tech team has been effectively applying Agile offshore software development principles. We practice this while adopting them in the best suitable ways for all parties of app development process. Find out how we apply these methods in future of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) from the related posts. Now, let’s make it a discussion for all; which of the above listed and explained practices do you follow? Which one did you find the most outstanding? We don’t know it all, so do you think there are other practices that work for Agile offshore software development and are worth stating? We will like to hear from you. Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments section so that we can help and learn!
