Every Information Technology organization is under pressure to deliver more business value with lower costs. Rightshoring (the combination of onshore and offshore resources) is a highly effective means of reducing costs while maintaining and possibly increasing delivery effectiveness. Building effective teams is difficult and building geographically disbursed teams is even more difficult. Successful Rightshoring takes dedicated leadership, solid planning, and strong execution to be effective and TechDiscovery brings this to every customer. This is especially true when Agile software development methods are to be used in conjunction with offshore development teams.

Agile software development has become increasingly popular and is now in widespread use. Agile methods use the Agile Manifesto as a basis for developing practices. Several of these practices such as valuing interaction more than documentation, holding frequent team stand-up/scrum meetings, and delivering software frequently (weekly, bi-weekly, or at most monthly) are somewhat in conflict with many offshore development company’s CMMI Level 4/5 processes because many CMMI processes are implemented to be fairly document-centric. How are these different processes to be reconciled? TechDiscovery has developed TDFlex to handle this situation (as well as others).

TDFlex supports Agile Rightshoring by ensuring that the key premises behind Agile development are maintained while using flexibility in other areas to deal with the realities of geographically and culturally diverse onshore/offshore teams. TechDiscovery commonly instructs offshore project managers to hold daily scrum meetings and manage their teams using Agile methods. Onshore team members hold their own daily scrum and frequently (at least twice a week) inspect the documents, source code, and executable packages produced by the offshore team. Scrum of Scrum meetings are held between the offshore project manager and technical lead, and the onshore scrum master and technical lead. Tying these two teams activities together using a single Agile-focused task management tool such as VersionOne completes the picture.

As in all software development, Agile Rightshore development requires constant leadership and management attention, picking the right staff, building project teams with appropriate roles, and adjusting to the reality being lived by the teams. The payoff is lower cost software development with increased business value delivered.

If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to me.

To find out more on how we can help you Rightshore, contact Craig Guarnieri, TechDiscovery’s CTO.