Managing Offshore Software Projects

Verma, Vikas (2008) Managing Offshore Software Projects. Icfai University Press.

A new book republished the Scrum case study on the highest performing large project ever recorded.

Sutherland, J, Viktorov, A., and Blount, J. (2006) Adaptive Engineering of Large Software Projects with Distributed/Outsourced Teams. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston, MA, 25-30 June.

This project distributed Scrum teams so that half of each team was in the United States at SirsiDynix and the other half of each team was at Exigen Services in St. Petersburg, Russia. It showed how to set up distributed/outsourced teams to achieve both linear scalability of teams on a large project and distributed velocity of each team the same as the velocity of a small colocated team.

This project is still generating controversy in the Agile community by showing that you can run distributed high performance Scrums. There were quality problems on this project that caused some in the Agile community to discount the remarkable results and argue that it could not be repeated successfully.

However, Xebia in the Netherlands has now repeated the fully distributed model on a seried of projects using Scrum with a complete implementation of XP practices inside each Scrum team. Half of each team on all large projects is based in the Netherlands and the other half of each team is based in India. They achieve the same performance as the SirsiDynix project with extremely low defect rates. Their definition of done at the end of each Sprint is that the software has been successfully acceptance tested by the end user.

A paper on the Xebia experience has successfully passed the first phase of the review process for publication at Agile 2008 in Toronto.

Fully Distributed Scrum: The Secret Sauce for Hyperproductive Outsourced Development Teams. Jeff Sutherland, Ph.D., Guido Schoonheim, Eelco Rustenburg, Maurits Rijk.