« Agile Work Cheat Sheet Published | Main | The Role of the Process Owner »
Share this post:
August 23, 2005 
Agile Offshoring References
Many people are trying out Agile Work in software development. The current industry climate is one that has focused business stakeholders' attentions on re-examining their core priorities. Where Agile optimizes on "Time to market", the offshoring "over-the-wall" approach to software development seeks to optimize on raw dollar cost.
What do you do if your organization is attempting both? There are some good resources on-line about this already, however I have yet to see good case-studies with published figures. Also, much of what's out there comes in the form of mini-articles that are no more than promotional ads for X proprietary "agile-offshore" solution. Regardless, some of the following may help avoid the worst problems of integrating two quite different approaches.
- Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development: by Martin Fowler
- A look at Valtech's approachfrom within the project. This calls itself a case-study, but no metrics are provided
- The sad and understandable ruminations of Jonathan Nolen on his blog, regarding Agile offshoring and his expectations of the project. These attitudes and cocerns are quite common - this is a good poster for the kind of feeling you might find from developers.
- Vincent Massol's presentation to Javapolis. No proofs or metrics, though some lessons learned are provided.
- A forrester research article on Agile Outsourcing. Note: this is only the abstract - the article is $350. (I should ask for a commission. :)
- Some practical advice on agile offshoring from a Thoughtworks fellow.
- Good points about customer proxies that are very applicable to offshoring with agile
- A very good summary of an ongoing conversation about fixed-bid contracts and Agile. It relates to the agile-offshore issue given that often projects are offshoring because of cost-sensitivity, and are thus fixed-bid.
- A look at criteria for choosing offshore partners based on Agile business readiness.
- Article by Scott Ambler on agile outsourcing.
- Article by Scott Ambler on agile outsourcing.
Related articles can be found in the following categories:
Business
, Howto
, Management
, Software
I also maintain a page of references and recommended links to materials related to agile methods.
Posted by Christian Gruber at August 23, 2005 03:47 PM
