Software Sweatshop

...you can’t negotiate with a methodologist.

Needless to say, following a good methodology is an integral part of any respectable software development effort, particularly when you’re working with an offshore team. In fact, most offshore horror stories have less to do with the technical expertise of the developers and more to do with how the project is handled. Many times projects get compromised because the vendor is juggling too many projects at once. Resources are scarce, teams get stretched, deadlines are missed… you know the drill.

Project failures rarely happen at the ‘ones and zeros’ level, so the real trick is to communicate with your team constantly (daily) to make sure expectations are clear and work is being done according to plan. So what you’re paying for is the set of principles that your vendor has established, their culture, their hiring and retention strategies, their growth vision, their industry expertise. The real question becomes, at the moment of truth, are they willing to cut corners and compromise these principles?

Even if they have technical weaknesses, working with principled methodologists who compromise for no one will always lead to success. Companies that define themselves and refuse to compromise will give you the only thing that really matters in business… trust.

I just saw a great video on the Scrum methodology delivered by Ken Schwaber at Google back in 2006.

Scrum is like having a gun to your head; if you can't produce results, be transparent, look for the simplest solution, adhere to strict deadlines, be held accountable, work incrementally and iteratively, respond to dynamic change, and deliver quality, you, your project, your company, and your career are dead. It's not all gloom and doom though, you'll be surprised at what you can come up with if you actually do follow this methodology.

It's perfectly suited for offshore software development. In fact, I can see why distributed software development teams that don't follow Scrum or Agile usually fail.

But as you'll see, Scrum isn't for everyone. It means looking at the facts, good or bad, and making very tough decisions. True adoption of Scrum is a real test of an organization's culture. With Scrum, you can't stick your head in the sand. A very valuable lesson for anyone that's been part of a failed offshore development effort.