Agile Scrum and globally distributed teams

Agile Scrum and globally distributed software development

Challenges and Solutions

Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM

Date: 2013-03-30

(Currently looking for consulting opportunities within USA.  Please contact joevgh@gmail.com)

• Communication is the single largest contributor of the failure of agile scrum in globally distributed teams
• Scrum is not optimal for globally distributed teams, but it works better than many other processes.
• Scrum aggravates the challenges faced by globally distributed teams
• Globally distributed scrum requires few  other  roles compared to traditional Scrum
• Agile process knowledge still very limited in several of off-shore locations. Hence resources trained in agile process are also limited and very high in demand
• Many global vendors are very comfortable in water-fall process where deliverable is highly predictable. Ever changing agile process brings disruption to that flow.
• But even with all of the above Agile Scrum in globally distributed teams are here to stay because benefits outweighs challenges

 1.       Background

With wide acceptance of Agile SCRUM from Silicon Valley startups to every day software development, several organizations with globally distributed operations have already switched to agile or on the process of switching. This presentation mainly focuses the challenges of North American companies to do globally distributed software development in countries with 10-12 hours of time difference. Several techniques are listed in the article to resolve every day issues faced by these teams both off-shore and onsite. This article is based on practical experience of resolving different challenges.

2.       Off-shore and Near-shore teams

Software development teams from India, China, Russia, Poland and few others in the same region are generally referred as off-shore software development teams. Eastern Europe and South American companies also provide cheap software development solutions which are normally referred as near-shore teams.

3.       Not optimal but works well

It is not optimal to do agile development in a globally distributed team environment.  But benefits of the agile process outweigh the challenges faced compared to any other process like waterfall or RUP.

4.       Challenges and Solutions in a Distributed Scrum

4.1   Country based

Every country brings some natural challenges to software development. Agile by its nature of requirements like close interaction and communication within a team, aggravates some of these issues.

India and China brings the disadvantages of 10-12 hours of time difference with any of the North American companies. China and several others bring the disadvantage of English language.

But china has advantage over India and several others to do business in Japan, South Korea because of the language knowledge.

4.2   Communication

If an off-shore agile SCRUM project fails, single largest contributor of the failure will be communication due to 10-12 hours’ time difference between North American companies and off-shore development countries. North American companies having off-shores teams in Eastern Europe or South America have a better overlapping hours between both off-shore and onsite teams.

Some of the solutions are as follow:

i.        Video based meetings

ii.        One Instant  messenger  for onsite and off-shore staff

iii.        Overlapping working hours

iv.        Common sprint management tool including query escalation and resolution

v.        Automated daily status reporting

vi.        Shared source code repository

vii.        Common Build and deploy infrastructure

viii.        Share Drive

ix.        Shared Wiki for Information exchange

4.3   Resource Challenges on off-shore locations

Staff get selected in most agile development team’s is 1 in 5 interviewed. Most off-shore locations have very high demands for highly trained software developers and their low availability. More so in agile, it is better to select the candidates with better fit for agile process.

4.4   Team Layout Changes

Most effective team for agile off-shore development is combined off-shore onsite team 7 onsite and 5 off-shore. In my experience none of the other team layout are as successful as above.

4.5   Additional Roles Required

With the time difference there are additional role in the off-shore scrum team.

4.5.1 Off-shore scrum master

Senior member of the team assume this responsibility to resolve queries and status.

4.5.2 Proxy Product owner

There will be only one Product Owner in the team located generally onsite.  Off-shore should have equivalent proxy product owner role reporting to product owner. This role will speed up the development process

4.6   Additional Meetings  and Process Steps

Release planning (onsite)

Sprint backlog (combined)

Story pruning meeting (Add more details to excite meaningful discussion)

Sprint Planning (onsite)

Sprint Planning (off-shore)

Combined sprint planning (Off-shore and onsite)

Daily Stand-up off-shore

Daily Stand-up Onsite and off-shore together

Sprint Retrospect (Combined)

Burn down chart (Combined and/or separated)

4.7   Process Knowledge

Agile process knowledge is very minimal in several off-shore locations and many teams are learning fast. Besides China still lags overall delivery framework. Travel of resources both direction will help with this.

4.8   Agile contracts

Most off-shore units are run by vendors of the client organization of North American Countries.  Both vendors and clients like fixed process contracts whereas agile is ever changing and fixed price is not much of possibility rather T&M contracts are used.  It is overly difficult to commit deliverable within T&M

4.9   Onsite Knowledge Travel

Bringing people to onsite will speed up knowledge transfer and it is important to do onsite knowledge transfer to several of the key employees.  This also helps to attract right talent to the team.

4.10      Sending regular Ambassadors to off-shore

Occasional travel (Once in 6 month at least) is very important to build trust between onsite and off-shore teams.

5.       Opportunities

5.1   Low cost and reasonable quality

Lower cost and comparable quality are still reasons for outsourcing software development to off-shore locations.  Some arguably say the availability of man-power, which is difficult to validate.

5.2   Better overall results

In my experience overall quality for several stakeholders are good compared to the traditional waterfall fixed price projects. Often the entire project is executed on a lesser cost than waterfall.

6.       Conclusion

As mentioned earlier off-shore software development using Agile SCRUM is here to stay.  It is adopted by many development teams every day and early adopters are beneficial from cost advantage as well as earned value.

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Roles and Responsibilities in Onsite Off-shore Agile Scrum

Roles and Responsibilities in Onsite Off-shore Agile Scrum Teams

(Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM,  joevgh@gmail.com)

(Currently looking for consulting opportunities within USA.  Please contact joevgh@gmail.com)

• Role and responsibilities of offshore and on-site scrum teams are different.
• Difference is mainly due to time difference and cultural issues.
• Because of these differences sprint process requires several additional process steps to make off-shore scrum working
• Proxy Product owner is almost a must for off-shore scrum team success
• Product owner talents very limited in availability in many of off-shore countries
• Strong, independent, self-organizing scrum teams will not be reality in the near future (there could be one-off)
• To some degree, culture differences make it hard in creating self-organizing teams. But help is on the way.

1.     Introduction

Distributed agile teams are always a challenge to work together. Even more so when it comes to 10-12 hours of time difference to off-shore location like India and China. Absence of a product owner in an off-shore location makes very hard for an off-shore team to perform. But it is a reality that, these teams will have to be located different parts of the world due to cost reasons. The successful formula has to take different approach.

2.    Scrum work flow

• Release planning (onsite)
• Sprint backlog (combined)
• Sprint Planning (onsite)
• Sprint Planning (off-shore)
• Combined sprint planning (Off-shore and onsite)
• Daily Stand-up off-shore
• Daily Stand-up Onsite and off-shore together
• Sprint Retrospect (Combined)
• Burn down chart (Combined and/or separated)

3.    What is different and why

Traditional off-shore work culture is very much adapted to water fall process, which includes well documented requirements and very well defined deliverables and contractual obligations controlling delivery components.

Agile comes with exact opposite of these requirements which makes it very hard for the team to operate. Some of the challenges will be as follows

3.1 Undocumented requirements

It will be difficult to conceptualize the business problem on a faraway off-shore location without strong domain knowledge. The presence of strong product owner with lots of domain knowledge can help to bridge the gap.

 

3.2 Work Culture

Generally off-shore has strong committed work culture.  Most off-shore location like India and china has very young work force with 1-5 years of experience. This young and dynamic workforce can contribute very well if fewer variants are placed on them.  Strong leadership is a necessity in that case.

 

3.3 Interaction Requirement

Off-shore teams are built mostly not to have many interactions because of time zone difference. Agile enforces that interaction.   This demands requirements of after-hours telephone connectivity as well as equipment to carry-out the work.

 

3.4 Process Structure

Off-shore teams are very familiar with strong process culture. Agile in essence is very lean on processes. Process ensures the quality even in the absence of strong leadership. Therefore off-shore agile teams require some amount of process.

 

3.5 Metrics

Off-shore teams are very familiar with performance metrics.  Defining and distributing those metrics can set goals for productivity, performance and thus overall improvement in sprint process.

4.    Off-shore Team structure, Roles and Responsibilities

4.1 Off-shore team structure

Dual-shore Teams Structure:

Dual shore team functions as one team at multiple locations with one scrum master and meetings with all of the members from different parts of the world.

Shared-Shore Teams Structure:

Shared-Shore team will have one scrum master; teams mostly function as multiple teams where daily standup area attended only by core members of team from multiple locations.

4.2 Roles and Responsibilities

Onsite agile catalyst:

This role is very similar to off-shore coordinator role in waterfall except responsibilities are different.  Agile catalyst is a member of off-shore team located onsite. His main responsibility is communication between teams and attending all team meetings from off-shore as well as onsite.  This resource will not have direct sprint task rather works reviewer of deliverables.

Off-shore proxy Product Owner:

This position is very confusing to several of agile teams.  But this is an important position for agile scrum success. This resource works very closely with actual product owner to understand product owner vision and then direct the off-shore team based on the vision.  One of the important point to note here is that this resource will not have any decision making capacity.  Ownership of every decision goes back to actual product owner only.

Off-shore sprint team:

Off-shore sprint team layout is very similar to onsite.

5.    Hand-off between onsite and off-shore teams

Hand-off is an important part of success of teams from multiple locations. Story acceptance to offshore sprint team to be clearly discussed on requirement standpoint as well as on assumptions made. Sprint planning is good place to clear those doubts.  As like in any environment, expectation management is an important part of the hand-off both ways. Daily stand-up is good place to reiterate the decision taken and most importantly assumptions not validated. Impediments and their impact have to be clearly discussed. Expectations on every deliverables have to be discussed.

6.    Cultural difference

Every country has cultural difference of its own.  Education, induction to work force, work culture is very different in many countries.  India and china are prime example of hierarchical work culture to some degree closes opportunity to voice bigger concerns, sometime even opinions.   Scrum requires open and honest opinions and discussions to take advantages of self-organizing team.  To some degree lot of times off-shore sprint teams have to put to test to question solutions and ideas floated by others.

7.     Strong Independent Agile teams, Myth or Reality

Rapid advance in collaboration tools and gaining acquaintance of work culture in different countries will make independent agile teams possible in few years.

8.   Conclusion

This discussion is to communicate that, scrum teams on an off-shore location is still a challenge, but can be done.  It takes lot of effort to make it work.  If not managed properly time in managing an off-shore team will eat into sprint tasks with in onsite team members.  Often some of best talents in the team will be pulled to solve problems from off-shore which also can create a team moral issue and of course productivity.

Performance Metrics for Agile SCRUM Process

Performance Metrics for Agile SCRUM Process

Joseph Vargheese PMP CSM CSP, joevgh@gmail.com 

(Currently looking for consulting opportunities within USA.  Please contact joevgh@gmail.com)

• The metrics below focus on 5 different areas, Productivity, Quality, Effectiveness of SCRUM, Earned Value and Predictability of the SCRUM.
• Metrics listed below will help track overall health of agile scrum process on enterprise level.
• Normal Agile metrics are limited to commitments with in sprint like sprint burn down and stories dropped. Customer satisfaction is an important metrics.
• Employee satisfaction indexes will help to realize true values of agile process and then work as an enabler for creating high performance sprint teams.
• Though SCRUM ensure quality and releasable product after every sprint, quality will still be a  concern due to the nature of changes allowed with in a sprint and hence those metrics are very important.

 

1.     Introduction

A process is an enabler for software development. Process improvement requires quantitative measurements. Following information covers some of measurement techniques effective in agile Scrum process. These metrics can be further subdivided to get more accurate measurements

All of the below information are related to Agile SCRUM process only.

2.     Measurements in any process

• Productivity
• Quality
• Effectiveness of process
• Earned Value
• Predictability of the process

3.     Units of Measurements

• KPI is a metric with strategic objective of performance and should have at least one time bound value
• Metrics is any measure of a component
• SLA is a contract on meeting certain KPI between two parties.
• Metrics will lead to define KPI, and then further lead to define SLA

 

4.     Productivity

4.1   SCRUM Team Productivity (KPI) respective to peer teams

SCRUM Productivity is relative measurement between teams.  One of the easy measures is number of hours taken  between teams on Small/Medium/Large story types.  Story Points will be better to remove confusion of hours.

Example based on average hours by each story type over 1 year time

Story T-shirt Size	# of Stories Analyzed	Average Hours/story of 4 Teams	Sprint Team 1(hours)	Sprint Team 2(hours)	Sprint Team 3(hours)	Sprint Team 4 (Hours)
Small	420	14	10	16	12	18
Medium	800	27	22	28	22	35
Large	350	59	45	68	49	72
Extra Large	80	102	85	102	95	125

Example based on average Story Points by Sprint team per year

	Average Story Points/team/sprint	Sprint Team 1(SP)	Sprint Team 2(SP)	Sprint Team 3(SP)	Sprint Team 4 (SP)
Story Points	70	90	65	98	55

 

4.2 Test case automation velocity within a Sprint (KPI)

It is often referred as number of test cases automated with in a Sprint/per day/per tester

4.3 Test case execution velocity within a Sprint (KPI)

It is often referred as number of test cases executed with in a Sprint/per day/per tester

5.    Quality

5.1  Pre-Release Bugs (KPI)

This is a measure of defects introduced by Sprint development measured by the amount of hours spend to correct the issues tracked by team.

Examples based on Rework hours introduced by each team

	Sprint Team 1(hours)	Sprint Team 2(hours)	Sprint Team 3(hours)	Sprint Team 4 (Hours)
Release 1.0	104	140	55	77
Release 1.1	140	154	77	86
Release 1.2	76	175	45	95

5.2 Post-Release Bugs (KPI)

The defects slipped into production from sprint measured by sprint team introduced the defects and hours spend on fixing the defects.

Examples based on Rework hours introduced by each team

	Sprint Team 1(hours)	Sprint Team 2(hours)	Sprint Team 3(hours)	Sprint Team 4 (Hours)
Release 1.0	14	23	19	14
Release 2.0	0	14	23	0
Release 3.0	0	19	0	23

5.3  Number of issues found during code review process with in a sprint (KPI)

5.4  Number of defects found with in a story with in a sprint (KPI)

This metrics is an indicator of the clarity of requirement or quality of resources.  Both reasons could result in unexpected defects within a story. Appropriate remediation can be implemented based on metrics

 

6     Effectiveness of SCRUM

6.1 Capacity available (KPI)

Sum of original capacity available in a Sprint based resource availability and sprint duration

6.2 Velocity (KPI)

Sum of original estimates of all accepted work

6.3 Estimate Expansion (KPI)

Sum of work found during sprint work

6.4 Amount of work dropped out of Sprint (KPI)

6.5 Accuracy of Story Estimation (KPI)

6.6 Capacity utilization (KPI)

This is a very loosely used term with Sprint process.  This forces the team member to report all of the time he worked in a specific project. There is no specific rule of thumb here.  It is very easy to get 85% of time reported in any reporting system.

 

7    Earned Value

Earned value is an important part of waterfall process.  Earned value is a direct measurement in Waterfall process based on hours worked to date and the features completed.

7.1 Number of features released (KPI)

7.2 Number of Story Points released (KPI)

7.3 Cost incurred per release (KPI)

7.4 Number of Story Points remaining for a release (KPI)

7.5 Money required to complete a release (KPI)

7.6 Number of story points accepted by Product Owner (KPI)

 

 

8    Predictability of the SCRUM

8.1 Sprint burned down chart (KPI)

Sprint burn down chart will help to predict health of the sprint as well as the possibility completion of stories committed with in sprint.

8.2 Accuracy of Story Estimation (KPI)

Story estimation expansion is a common problem during the sprint.

8.3 Amount of work dropped out of Sprint (KPI)

8.4 Hours lost because of Impediments with in Sprint (KPI)

8.5 Number of queries originated due to unclear requirements (KPI)

8.6 Estimation expansion due to changing requirements with in sprint (KPI)

 

9    Customer Satisfaction (KPI)

It is measured using the input from the customer. Usually a set of questions will be answered by the user about both qualitative and quantitative satisfaction of the customer.

 

10  Employee Satisfaction (KPI)

Similarly for employee satisfaction is measured directly from employee user anonymous surveys, peer reviews or one-on-one sessions.  It is important to understand the employee satisfaction.  It often is a sizeable factor in creating high performance SCRUM team.

11  Conclusion

Above defined KPIs are only few high level KPIs.  These KPIs can be further subdivided into more granular level ones, to make to 1000 KPIs

Author: Joseph Vargheese  joevgh@gmail.com

India and China IT Resource Challenges, 2012 Contemplation

• India and China provides the largest pool of outsourcing software development talents to the global market.
• Even though a million graduates come out every year in India and China, very few are globally employable.
• More than 80% of developed nations’ talents  are globally employable where as China is 10% and India is 25%
• Rapid increase of need in India and china forces employers to train talents outside of the traditional supply of talents.
• Growth of local and global markets makes even lower skill level resource in high demand.
• Today’s scarcity in India and China will be tomorrow’s resource “threat” to talents in developed countries because of the sheer volume of  resources now getting trained.

Introduction

There is no doubt that India and China provides largest pool of outsourcing software development talents to global market. With 1.3+ billion people in India or China, thousands of universities and tens of thousands of technical institutes/colleges, one would imagine that getting right IT technical talents in these countries is very easy.  But truth of the matter, it is extremely difficult to get to right talent.  This article will list some of the parameters causing this issue and solutions for it. It has lot to do with university systems/training programs in these countries.

Resource Threat to Rest of the World

But how can these resources be a threat to resources in other countries, if there is scarcity in India and China.  Important point is that if companies need resources and if the university system did not train them, these organizations will train these resources to make them globally competitive for multinational employers to attract such talent.

Choice of Higher Education in India and china

	India	China
Universities	348	2884
Regular Colleges	17625	–
Engineering Colleges	3573	–
Total Yearly Graduates	847000	1,900,000
Computer/Engg Grads	497000	763000
Globally employable talent %	25%	10%
Globally  employable talent /year	124000	76300

As per 2011 UGC of India statistics, India has 348 universities with 17625 colleges which include 3573 engineering colleges and 828 colleges educating Computer science/Computer Application post graduates, accounting total of 847000 graduates, in which around 497,000 graduates are trained to work in computer related industries. With 2884 universities and several thousands of colleges china produces 1.9 million graduates including 763000 engineering graduates (3 year and 4 year) trained to work in computer industry.

My Experience

During last two years, I interviewed more than 250 computer professionals of varied skill sets from India and China for different types of openings.  Results were not encouraging.  Most of them are not trained enough to work for global market place, atleast not to the extent that western universities train resources.   Very small percentages of them are globally employable.

Following difference will explain why these resources are globally deployable.

Education Streams India and China

Even though years of education are very similar, talents coming out of these universities are not same skill level. Most cases they possess far below skill set than western graduates.

USA Equivalent qualification in India
Associate Degree	Graduate Degree	Post-Graduate Degree
Diploma – Engineering  Diploma (3 years)	BE– Bachelor of engineering(4 years)	MS – Master of Science in engineering(2 Years)
BSc– Bachelor of Science (3 years)	B.Tech – Bachelor of  Technology(4 Years)	ME – Master of Engineering (2 years)
BA – Bachelor of Arts(3 years)	MSc – Master of Science(2 years)	M.Tech – Master of Technology (2 years)
BCA -Bachelor of Computer Application (3 years)	MCA – Master of Computer Application(3 Years)
PGDCA – Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Application(PGDCA)

 

USA Equivalent Qualifications in China
Associated Degree	Graduate Degree	Post-Graduate Degree
Associated Degree of Science (3 years)	BS – Bachelor of Science – (4 to 5 years)	MSc – Master of Science 2 to 3 years)
Associated Degree of Engineering(3 years)	BE – Bachelor of Engineering (4 to 5 years)	ME – Master of Engineering (2 years)
Associated Degree of Art (3 years)	BA– Bachelor of Arts (BA)(4 to 5 years)	MA – Master of Arts(2 years)

 

Innovative vs. Transaction Talents

Education system in India and china produces majority of transaction based talents. Transaction based talents are well known for their ability to understand certain defined problem domain and find solution for problem.  These talents are very good in repetitive tasks and often provide higher productivity as they attain more experience.

Those who can bring innovation to engineering process are often called as innovative talents.  Innovative talents are abstract thinkers and great problem solvers.  They also work well within a team and possess strong personal skills. Many universities in India and china do train such talents, but volumes of talents are very less.  IIT/NIT programs in India and “C9 league” programs in China are best examples of such training programs. Lately several private universities in India train and produce top talents.

Choosing education selection stream

There is a major difference on how students choose education stream in India and China compared western world.  Most part of western world students chooses education stream based on their interest.  But in these Asian countries, education selection is driven by earning potential at large.  Most often these programs are selected by their parents or relatives for them. School system is not equipped to guide this student to right career paths. Most often lot of students end up in careers they are not passionate about.  Students with interest may not be able secure admission because the competition from the above group.  Situation is slowly changing in India and China with emergence of several alternate education streams now to train these resources in IT field.

Skills gap in India and china

Here are major difference between western world and Asian countries. Some of them are part of culture and some are part of education.

English: English knowledge is not wide spread in all of China and rural India. India still have higher % of English speaking population due to English being medium of instruction in most of the Indian universities. Besides, British ruled India almost 2.5 centuries, and left English awareness all across the country. On the other hand china started these programs probably only few years ago. Their medium instruction is still in Chinese. China introduced the CET (College English Test) levels (4, 6) in recent years as part graduation process. But these exams only guarantee writing skills and emphasize on spoken language. Younger population in china speaks better. During my 2010 visit to China, I spoke to several students in university and schools system and they seem to have higher skills in English and thus future looks promising to China.

Team work: Team work: Ability to work in team comes natural to graduates of several western universities.  It is a premium skill set for lot of graduates in India and China. This is due to education systems, training of these graduates. Several of education curriculums in India and china give higher importance to academics and often forget to impart enough training in team building and leadership activities. We are seeing big leap in India, in this area from private universities and premium private colleges. They are showing active interest in training such talent using varied facets of skill development programs.

Technical skills: Average technical skill level of equivalent degrees in India and China is far below expectation from average western university graduates. This is due to the lack of practical problem driven training coupled with excellent lab facilities and access to best teachers.

Some other areas of challenge are leadership and problem solving skills.

Conclusion

With the increased demand of IT talents in India and China, these talents with lower skill level is also put to work.  Many of these talents are getting trained and over period of time these skill gaps will be filled with job based training.  It is interesting to see how these talents will fill the global demand of skilled workers as world is turning out to be more and more one single open society.

                                                                                                       

Author: Joseph Vargheese  joevgh@gmail.com  

 

 

Practical Approach in Creating Agile Test Cases

• Test case discovery happens throughout the sprint process.
• Exploratory testing will uncover the hidden cases and expand to better coverage.
• Overall, finding test cases in agile is a challenging process.
• Definition of “done” of a story/feature is not clearly quantifiable.
• Start with happy path and take following step by step approach to expand coverage.
• Full step by step test case documentation is overkill, rather use summary test cases.
• Most part, acceptance criteria defines the “done” for a Sprint story.

Introduction

Identifying test cases in Agile is a somewhat difficult task.  In traditional waterfall or RUP, there will always be galore of documents to deduce this information from and in most cases every test case can be traced from some kinds of documented business/ system/ technical/ functional requirements.  Agile by its nature is very lean in documentation. This will create an issue in defining completion point for a feature distributed across several stories. This article defines the process of finding most test cases documented and undocumented with in a feature/story.

Step 1: Input points for test case scenarios

Traditional Agile scrum has following input points where test case scenarios can be uncovered. Every input provides different information. The list below is not conclusive.

• Story documentation: Generally very slim.  Intention is to start conversation and get confirmation on requirements and definition of “done”.
• Acceptance criteria for story: Talks about final intent of the story and definition of what makes story “done”.
• Use cases /Requirement docs (if any)/UI specification (if any): Most cases use cases can be converted to test cases. Well written requirement will be very rare in agile stories.  If it exists, mapping every requirement to test case is an easy task.
• Sprint planning discussion: Discuss almost all flows including happy path, alternate flows and exceptions flows. Discussion also includes boundary conditions, business rules, existing functionality changes etc.
• Sprint standup: Discuss daily issues.  Always listen to change in flows as well as corner conditions.
• Discussion with Developer/Product Owner: Works as a confirmation on numerous information received.
• Sprint retrospect: Why test coverage is not enough for stories? Test case modification happens after the fact.
• Exploratory testing: Testing through system without a specific test case.  This is the most effective method to find missing test case. This is method has been very successful with several agile teams.

 Step 2: Collecting Data

• Tester is involved in all steps of sprint process. Following information should be sourced during all meetings in step 1.
• Change in any existing functionality: This will results in modification/adding of existing test cases.
• Happy path:  Tester will hear this several times during the process. Similarly alternate path/flow is also important.  Identify the number of alternate flows and make sure all flows are working.
• Path of failures: Popularly called exception flow, flow terminated due to errors
• Guard conditions: Example, login time out
• Boundary Conditions: Also called as corner conditions. This will make sure that application will work for intended range of input data.
• Business Rules: Group the business rules and test for one group at a time
• Event based notifications: Any trigger point for any of the available functionality
• Non-Functional requirements: Like performance or load of the system
• Data mapping documents: Test cases can directly be derived from data mapping document.
• Assumptions
• Constraints
• External Dependency: Is this dependent of any external interface for data pull or data push.

Even though all of these conditions (if exits) will result in test cases, every story will not have all of the above scenarios

Step 3:  Organizing the test cases

Since agile input points are many, it is possible that test cases closely related to each other will duplicate across locations.  Always organize test cases by functionality if possible.

Step 4:  Examining coverage

Most testers like to have 100% test coverage. Exploratory testing is the most viable solution to reach 100% test coverage. Since traditional RTM is missing in agile, acceptance criteria will also determine the coverage of test cases required.  Creating an “Acceptance Traceability Matrix” will help to cross check the coverage.

Step 5: Review

After completing test cases, always make sure to be reviewed by product owner or scrum master/developer.  Any coverage miss derived during the review process will be added/updated to test cases.

Step 6: Continuous integration from defects and enhancements

Product defects as well as enhancements will add/modify test cases. Defects generally indicates overlook of test coverage during the sprint testing.

More details contact author: Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM, Joevgh@gmail.com,

Building an Onsite Off-shore Agile SCRUM Team

Building an Onsite Off-shore Agile SCRUM Team

 (Joseph Vargheese, joevgh@gmail.com)

 

• This article assumes basic knowledge of agile scrum
• Agile scrum off-shore delivery model is much different than onsite agile model
• Off-shore teams are also different than onsite team,  role of  product owner in off-shore agile is very different than onsite team
• Right Off-shore team layout  is an important component for capacity utilization of team and productivity
• Agile is very lean in processes. But off-shore agile team requires matured processes for predictable delivery
• Because  of the absence of strong communication and interaction,  in sprint architecture/design  and in sprint test automation have to be scheduled outside the sprint
• Agile off-shore delivery model requires a dynamic organization culture including alternate  carrier path for technology lovers and lean processes which are uncommon in many off-shore companies
• Small vendors are more successful in agile off-shore delivery because of dynamic organization culture
• Strong governance models are a must in agile to set expectation and delivery

 

1. Introduction

It is difficult to engage agile team from offshore location. Many organizations have tried different models.  This article discusses the steps to create a model close to agile utilizing Agile Scrum process. Agile XP approach is not covered in this article, although these models are very similar. This article also requires basic knowledge of agile process and scrum.

Following intervals on the bottom of the picture are sprint intervals. Below picture shows different milestones. Further process steps are explained below.

2. Planning for an offshore sprint team

There should be some change in the thinking process to get the offshore agile model working. Agile in principle demands close collaboration as well as co-location. If we consider these requirements, off-shore development is not a candidate for agile development process. But all these requirements are possible in some shape and form. Model could be closer to the actual definition of agile to take advantage of the lower cost of development and trained off-shore staff.

Prepping client’s onsite staff with process change is an important part of initial discussion. Since offshore agile scrum process is not same as onsite scrum process, it is important to get training programs organized with experts in this area. Normally vendors will have experts in this area, who can help on educating offshore management on changing expectation from offshore teams, as well as on vendor’s successful agile offshore models. This is very important to avoid some of the surprise during initial phases of sprints. Some of the discussion points will be as follows

• Work intake process and delivery process.
• Path of escalating issues
• Current process structure
• Offshore delivery model
• Hierarchical culture in several offshore location and expressing the difference of opinion
• General resource challenges

3. Offshore and Onsite Collaboration Mechanisms

• Agreed upon on Overlapping working hours between onsite and offshore team.
• Collaboration tools and techniques

1. Video conferencing engines
2. Instant messenger
3. Shared WIKI space
4. Shared Drive Space
5. Shared artifacts repository (like SVN)

4. Why clients like Agile and vendors don’t

Vendors providing software off-shore services always want to have firm delivery and generally don’t like change. They are more comfortable in traditional waterfall which gives the predictability and stability to deliverables.

5. Overall sprint team roles for offshore

Overall offshore sprint team should include five distinct roles within sprint

• Onsite Scrum Master
• Onsite Product Owner
• Offshore agile catalyst(located onsite and facilitates offshore communication and delivery oversight)
• Offshore sprint team
• Offshore proxy Product Owner (Business analyst with strong domain knowledge)

6. Offshore Sprint Team Size

Most efficient offshore agile team in my experience is 5 Resources (3 Developer + 2 QA). Next logical choice will be 7 resources (4 Developer and 3 QA) and further logical choice will be 10 resources (6 Developer and 4 QA). This mix is more dependent of the complexity of application. As complexity increases number of QA should also increase and vice versa.

7. Off-shore sprint process

Off-shore sprint process is not exactly same as onsite sprint process.  Variations are required to suit time difference and often a 24 hours turnaround time.  Let us discuss the individual components in variation

Sprint planning:

Due to time difference, off-shore and onsite sprint planning will be done during two different time zones, though combined sprint planning process is always recommended.  In case of two separate sessions, it is preferable to have off-shore sprint planning process after onsite sprint planning process.  Onsite planning should discuss any impediments team see on implementing these stories, which could be technical, functional or infrastructure.   Off-shore sprint team should discuss and document  any onsite support required for these stories and on importance on timeliness of help.

Off-shore daily scrum:

Apart usual scrum, it is scrum master’s(SM) responsibility to track timely delivery of onsite support (technical, functional or infrastructure) documented during sprint planning and change story status to yellow or red and escalate communication to appropriate stakeholders.

Scrum of Scrum with onsite Scrum master(s):

This is a very important item for success of offshore sprint.  Off-shore SM and onsite SM should talk together about the impediments and supports required for the team and assign the ownership for the delivery of items. This is important decision point for dropping a story from sprint.  Onsite Agile Catalyst will lead effort in getting these items resolved for the off-shore team.

Sprint Retrospect:

Apart from normal sprint retrospect, team should reflect on better ways of getting support from onsite stakeholders clearly document steps worked during current sprint.

8. Agile in captive business units and dual-shore model

Agile dual-shore model with onsite client SM

Captive business units are offshore business units owned and operated by client. Captive business units generally work as an extension of client onsite teams. In that case following model works better. This model is also called as dual-shore model, which is a successful agile model.

• Most often dual shoring is the common agile practice in this environment. Dual-shore will have a collection of offshore and onsite teams in one agile sprint team.
• Possible team sizes will be as follows

1. 5 Onsite resources and 5 offshore resources
2. 7 Onsite resources and 5 offshore resources
3. 7 Onsite and 7 offshore will be an overkill

• In this offshore team, function as an independent sprint team with offshore lead.
• Offshore lead will be reporting to onsite Scrum Master.
• Depends on the experience resources, SM could be offshore or onsite.

9. Successful agile models vary with vendor

Agile implementations and vendor knowledge of agile vary with vendors. It is very important for a client organization to understand agile implementation in vendor organization, even before implementing agile in teams for delivery of project. In that case, several of agile skill set in vendor organization can be leveraged to delivery teams.

10 Agile vendor team model

This is not a recommended model. Chance of this model succeeding is very remote. In this model onsite agile catalyst will function as onsite scrum master. Onsite team will include BA and SME from vendor. Vendor sprint development team will be located offshore. Overall delivery responsibility will fall into onsite agile catalyst. Most often this  model  fails because inadequate onsite support system.

11 Agile vendor team model with shared delivery responsibility

This is one of the successful agile model in which delivery responsibility is with onsite scrum master.  In this model onsite agile catalyst report to onsite scrum master who owns overall delivery responsibility

shared agile off-shore team with onsite client SM

12. Agile in T&M model

Agile and T&M model goes hand in hand. But one of the challenges is the quantification of deliverables in this model. There is a clear definition of end product in water fall variations as well as RUP model. In agile, these end products will come as short increments. Though text-book agile talks about releasable product after a sprint, it may be releasable only after few sprints. Quality of deliverables can be determined only at that time. Seemingly well running sprint delivery will expose several quality issues at the time of release and will send several red flags to all parts of organization.

13. Agile in FP model

This is a very challenging model. Since fixed price require locked down requirements and agile allow change, it will be difficult for fixed price model to have agile delivery model. But “fixed” term can be used well in the equation. Instead of holding to fixed price, client can hold fixed SLA, Quality Metrics, productivity.

Following list of items with a target number will have almost same result of fixed price, but with better quality

• Capacity utilization (How many hours resource worked in all tasks within sprint)
• Productivity metrics (Sprint resource delivery time against average resource)
• Defects created during sprint development and found during sprint testing
• Defects induced to the product during sprint development
• Code quality measurements using standard tools (for example Sonar for Java, nDepend for C#.)
• Unit testing coverage

14. Starting an Agile Project

Much the work needs to happen before starting an agile sprint. Following items should be discussed during the kick-off meeting.

• Offshore resource selection and management process should be in place
• Offshore resource induction training programs should be in place
• Should have reasonable idea on quality metrics expected as well as training period
• Should have fair idea about the progression of velocity of sprint teams
• Should have defined role of product owner and have identified a person for that role

Following key points need to be finalized before starting an agile engagement

• Decide agile offshore team model
  • Dual-shore
  • Vendor team model (not recommended)
  • Vendor team model with shared delivery responsibility
  • Decide the team size
    • Based on the discussion above, please determine the appropriate team size
    • Define the role of agile catalyst and proxy product manager
    • Define the flow of feature to sprint and frequency of production release (following section will give pointers)
    • Decide on the quality metrics/SLA/KPI
    • Define governance framework/feedback mechanism

14.1 Flow of offshore agile sprint

As discussed earlier offshore agile sprint needs little more discipline  to be successful. Design and test case automation are the difficult issues within offshore agile sprint.  In the proposed process flow, high level and test automation has been taken out of development sprint.  High level design has been moved prior  to the feature development sprint and test automation has been moved after the development sprint.  This will help to reduce number of queries and decision points with in development sprint and bring better predictability.

Flow of a feature set in off-shore agile sprint

15. Onsite Support System.

Even before starting the sprint, onsite support system has to be defined and agreed upon with offshore teams. Resolving hardware and software issues will be one of the key elements during off hours.

16. Sprint -1 Design

Sprint-1 is defined as the sprint earlier to the development sprint. An offshore team requires little more disciples in terms of receiving work and committing to deliverables. Offshore units are generally several hundred miles away and several time zones apart. Communication will always be a challenge. High level design during the sprint will take lot of back and forth discussion and approval from different teams. Once the high level design is finalized, it is easier to do the rest of the design work within sprint. Otherwise the process normally hampers the delivery process and predictability.

17. Sprint -1 Story creation, review and estimation process

Once design is finished rest of time should be used to create stories and estimation required for the actual development sprint. This will help the teams to prioritize stories within a development sprint reducing the unknowns. Quality will be better as well because clarity of requirements and design is very clear at the point of development.

Estimation is little tricky for scrum process. Many organization use variation FP called story point.  Story point calculates estimate based complexity of the story and comparison similar estimates in the past.  Story points will be translated to hours if sprint burn down is tracked using hours.

18. Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery

Agile normally recommends continuous integration to reduce the unknowns. Even more offshore teams require continuous integration and build process to reduce integration problems in the beginning itself. Continuous delivery will also be recommended for offshore team. This will enable teams to improve productivity.

19. Sprint +1 Automation

Automation within sprint is a way to improve quality and overall ownership of software. Automation will reduce the cost of release and software certification. It will be ideal to do automation after completion of development and verification of software using manual scripts. Automation within development sprint normally creates heavy overhead of reworks down the road.

20. Offshore Scrum (Dos and Don’ts)

Best practices

• Make sure to filter and select the right talents for the team
• Create overlapping business hours for the offshore team with onsite resources.
• Enable close communication between onsite teams using agile catalyst
• Create measurement metrics for the team (ex: Capacity, productivity, defects created, code rework hours, communication lapse, code quality index)
• Create continuous improvement for the team based on sprint retrospect
• Daily progress report and time reporting for status
• Daily standup meeting with offshore
• Frequent offshore and onsite travel
• Daily review of all deliverables and daily feedback mechanisms
• Tracking offshore created reworks
• Maintaining WIKI based issue register for all impediments.
• Selecting a right vendor is the most important one of all

Practices to be discouraged

• Offshore only team with no onsite oversight
• Offshore team with no access to domain knowledge
• Set of offshore hidden factors also need to be avoided

21. Offshore Knowledge Transfer

On periodic basis offshore resources should travel to onsite location for knowledge transfer. It will be a good idea to send a knowledgeable resource to offshore for training. My recommendation will be to have yearly travel of 20% of the resources to onsite for KT for a period of 4-8 weeks.

22. Offshore interaction model

Most important factor in offshore interaction model is to avoid SPOF. Interaction model should be diversified in such a way that offshore failure or rework will not be suppressed.

23. Maintaining Issue Register

It is important to maintain global issue and risk register for offshore engagements. WIKI will be good place to keep track of this register. Key factor is that both offshore and onsite can update this on regular basis.

24. Evolution of Offshore Scrum

Offshore Scrum is still involving. People are experimenting new roles to make it a successful model. Standalone offshore scrum teams are still very far from realty. Though many companies are trying several variations of quasi offshore teams with an oversight from offshore design scrums and onsite requirement/feature creation scrums, net results of these experiments will take time to prove.

25. Agile delivery control (tools and techniques)

There are several tools available for code quality/requirement quality. These tools will help to tune the delivery without much overhead.

Following WIKI has several Code Quality Tools. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis

26. Creating a compare, contrast and challenge culture

This is one of most challenging task in an offshore environment in general. Even if resource recognizes the request that does not make sense, resource will shy in questioning the validity of the request. Creating such culture requires constant monitoring of communication from all sides. Communication has to be constructive in nature to address these issues and encourage them to challenge and reward the people challenging with right question. This is an important element to be inculcated in the team culture.

27. Switching to agile offshore team

Re-tuning waterfall to agile offshore project is a difficult task. It requires much bigger discussion. I am deferring the discussion for now.

28. Agile Fixed Price vs. SLA based delivery

Sections 9 and 10 have references to this section. Further discussion will be added soon.

 

29. Resource, Carrier Path and challenge in agile

One of the challenges I faced in the past are related to offshore resource career path. Some of offshore hiring managers will state that, “they could find enough developers with experience more than 5-6 years of experience” and agile teams require strong technical skills in large numbers to be successful. There is a cultural issue. Because of the phenomenal growth in software industry in India and China, it is almost given that after 5-6 years of experience good engineer will be promoted to manager. They manage a set of people and will be less practiced on technical skills.

30. Conclusion

Overall this article is intended to give an overview of offshore agile process in the current form. Since this is brief paper, several of details are not discussed in this article. If any of you are interested we can talk more details.

Qualities of deliverables are based on the quality of vendor providing services. After all quality can be inserted only to certain extend using process.

Thanks to Julie John for reviewing this article.

Is your off-shore engagement profitable

Is your off-shore engagement profitable

Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM

Atlanta GA USA

joevgh@gmail.com

Dated: 2012-03-09

 (This article is a qualitative assessment, so please don’t quote anywhere)

 

Background

Most companies do off-shore software development to save cost.  But in most cases it is not effective to have off-shore environment unless closely monitored. Even some of best run environment are not as profitable as perceived. Following method will help to measure off-shore effectiveness.  This model used to measure T&M offshore model. It can also be extended to use for outcome based as well as fixed cost models.

Perception  

Perception is deceiving.  Attraction of lower cost compared to onsite cost alone does not determine the cost effectiveness. There are overhead costs, not figured into this perception.

Early warning signs

• Are you hearing your manager’s complains about off-shore management difficulties?
• Are you hearing that your team members are not happy with off-shore software delivery?
• Are you hearing off-shore communication difficulties?

It is the time to measure your offshore productivity.

Understand variables

The first step is to understand following variables

1. Communication overhead (Communication overhead is due to time zone and cultural difference  generally calculated at 10% of cost. This is the time spend by your onsite team to communicate work required from offshore)
2. Capacity utilization (Billed hours vs actual productivity hours reported against task assigned)
3. Onsite governance cost (Cost of onsite governance to verify the deliverables produced from offshore environment estimated as high as 10%)
4.  Employee Productivity (Productivity of the offshore employee compared productivity of onsite employee)
5. Software rework cost on offshore created issues (case by case basis)

Measuring these variables

                Client should start measuring these variables on regular basis.

Average offshore operations is at 6$ loss per resource hour

How is that possible?  Let us examine some average numbers.

Capacity Utilization: 75%

Resource Productivity: 75%

Communication overhead: 10%

Onsite Governance: 15%

These numbers look very attractive to any normal user.

Let us assume your onsite cost per hour is 75$ your offshore cost is 25$ per hour. 

Your overall productivity is 75% * 75% which is approximately 50%

Your earned value is at 75$ * 50% = 37.5$

Your expense is 25$ + 75$ * (10%+15%) Onsite governance cost = 43.75$

In effect your offshore center is at loss of 6$ per hour of a resource

Steps to improve

1. Negotiate reasonable offshore rates.
2. Improve capacity by scheduling available capacity and tracking on regular basis (Target: 90%)
3. Improve your productivity by having KT programs and frequent onsite and offshore travel programs (Target: 85%)
4. Reduce onsite governance cost to 5% (Convert your offshore coordinator to a contributing resource)
5. Reduce communication overhead by having overlapping working hours (5%)
6. Reduce or avoid rework by putting together KT and close feedback mechanisms

Conclusion

Client required to have constant monitoring of these numbers to ensure minimum variance on achieved performance.  It is recommended to add a part-time role of offshore performance manager to monitor and govern the progress achieved.

Countries and Rates for off-shore software development

Countries and Rates for off-shore software development

Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM, Atlanta GA USA, joevgh@gmail.com

Dated: 2012-03-09

(Please let me know, if you need help in locating a vendor with lowest rates below in respective countries)

1.    Introduction

It is somewhat confusing for a company to do offshoring these days. With the entry of Latin American companies, it is somewhat confusing for a client to decide a vendor. Every country has certain strength and weakness. There are always some hidden factors in off-shore software development which will not be known to organization seeking services till engagement starts.

Please check here for Salary of Software Engineers Globally

2.  India (Tier-1 Cities) –Hourly Rate: 20$-40$

Strength

1. Natural choice
2. Long term player
3. Strong knowledge in offshore software delivery models
4. Strong process framework knowledge especially agile processes.
5. Highly experienced and large supply of experienced workers
6. Higher English language fluency (both written and oral)
7. Higher technical skill level and wide array of skill sets
8. Very good infrastructure

Weakness

1. Time zone difference  of 10-12 hours
2. Offshore operation cost is rising
3. Resource attrition is high as 25%

3.  India (Tier-2 Cities) – Hourly Rate: 12$-30$

Many Indian companies started operation tier-2 and tier-3 cities.  Apparent cost benefits are most often not transferred to organization seeking services.

Most of recent start-up in software industry originated from Tier-2 cities and there are variety of vendors offering niche services from these cities at lower cost.

Considering ROI on variety of services, Tier-2 cities have better ROI than Tier -1 and Tier 3 Cities.

One of challenge is lower supply of highly skilled man power.   But not every part of software development requires skilled resources.

4.  India (Tier-3 cities and below) – Hourly Rate: 12$-25$

One of challenge is lower supply of highly skilled man power. But not every part of software development requires skilled resources.

But attrition is also equally lower compared Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities.

Suitable for creating small web-site support and BPO operations.

 

5.  China (Tier -1) – Hourly Rate: 15$-40$

 Strength

1. Low cost operation suitable for software testing
2. Highest productivity on highly documented process driven work items
3. Large supply of experienced workers
4. Higher technical skill level on many areas
5. Very good infrastructure

Weakness

1. Time zone difference  of 10-12 hours
2. Lack of wide array of technology skill set
3. Lower oral English language skill set
4. Week software  development process  framework
5. Lack of knowledge in offshoring delivery model
6. Resource attrition is high as 25%

6.     China (Tier -2 and below) – Hourly Rate: 10$-25$

One of the advantages on moving to tier-2 cities in China is the lower operation cost. Tier-2 cities in China are 30% cheaper than Tier-2 cities.

Large supply of small companies in tier-2 cities in China. But the disadvantage is English speaking skills. If communication can be limited to email and instant messenger, these companies can do excellent delivery of services.

7.      Brazil – Hourly Rate: 30$-50$

 Strength

1. Same time zone as North American clients
2. Lower cost operation suitable for infrastructure outsourcing
3. Moderate supply of workers
4. Moderate technology skill set
5. Moderate oral English language skill set

Weakness

1. Strong labor union presence in software service sector force lower productivity
2. Scarcity of trained supply for resources and lack of wide array of technology skill set
3. Week software  development process  framework
4. Lack of knowledge in off-shoring delivery model
5. English language is still a challenge
6. Need strong training division for resources
7. Unstable governments and inadequate IP laws

8.     Vietnam – Hourly Rate: 10$-20$

Strength

1. Moderate English language skill set both oral and written
2. TBC…

 Weakness

1. Time zone difference  of 10-12 hours
2. Lack of experienced workers
3. Lack of wide array of technology skill set
4. Week software  development process  framework
5. Lack of knowledge in offshoring delivery model

 9.     Russia – Hourly Rate: 5$-20$

 Strength

1. Lowest cost of operation
2. TBC…

Weakness

1. Mostly email only communication
2. Lack of experienced workers
3. Lack of wide array of technology skill set
4. Week software  development process  framework
5. Lack of knowledge in offshoring delivery model
6. Lack of English language skill set both oral and written

 10. Argentina-Hourly Rate: 30$-55$

 Strength

1. Same time zone as North American clients
2. English language skill set both oral and written
3. TBC…

Weakness

1. Strong labor union presence in software service sector force lower productivity
2. Lack of experienced workers
3. Lack of wide array of technology skill set
4. Week software  development process  framework
5. Lack of knowledge in offshoring delivery model
6. Scarcity of trained supply for resources.
7. English language is still a challenge
8. Need strong training division for resources
9. Unstable governments and inadequate IP laws

 

11. Chile – Hourly Rate: 15$-25$

Strength

1. Same time zone as North American clients
2. TBC…

Weakness

1. Highly labor union driven economy
2. TBC…

 12. Costa Rica – Hourly Rate: 25$-50$

 Strength

1. Same time zone as North American clients
2. English language skill set both oral and written
3. TBC…

Weakness

1. TBC…

 12. Mexico – Hourly Rate: 35$-55$

Strength

1. Same time zone as North American clients
2. TBC…

Weakness

1. Labor union driven economy (not so much in software)
2. English language is still a challenge
3. Need strong training division for resources
4. Unstable governments and inadequate IP laws

High Performance Software Development Teams

High Performance Software Development Teams

Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM

Atlanta GA

Dated: 2012-03-03

joevgh@gmail.com

 

Introduction

Creating a high performance team often comes as a dream to several software development managers and senior management, because they often produce as high as 5 times the output of a normal team.  But it is not easy to put together a high performance team.  This article presents some steps to create and maintain high performance teams.

Accidental exposure

Three times in my 16 years of career, I had opportunity to work or manage high performance teams.  Almost all three times, evolving of these teams was very accidental. I was able to maintain the tempo of team and productivity level. I like to share my experience with these three very different environments.

Small and Nimble

Teams were small and nimble in all three instances with size of 4 or 5.  It make cross communication channels to minimum.

 Visionary Leadership

My first exposure to a high performing team comes from a small company.  I was a team member that time.  My manager was initially an individual high performer then built a small team of high performers. He understood the strength of every team member and proactively guide in the areas team member may face issues. Idea is, not to waste time. He encourage people to help each other even before other member seek for help.  I felt as if he could predict everything going to happen in the team which was always amazing to me. He was a visionary leader.  If we think outside the box, almost all of high performance companies are built by visionaries and so are the teams

 Co-dependent Members

Second exposure was in large insurance company where I was a manager.  I was asked to deliver mission critical project in small time frame and given freedom to pick the team members. Application has components from PC to web to mainframe and data return in the same path. I never looked at individual high performers instead selected performers who work together very well. To my surprise team worked very closely and came up with three different solutions.  Every member of the team was dependent on other’s skillset wherever applicable to speed up the process. We selected two solutions and worked in parallel sharing some of efforts on both solutions.  First solution was a performance disaster and second solution was a huge success.  Application was delivered on time with minimal or no defects. Same team was kept intact for several assignments and every one of them delivered on time.

 Identity and positioning

Imagine that your company wants to build a very high performance team.  You have selected 5 of your high performers and put in one team.  I can almost guarantee that it will be a disaster and high conflict of interest. My reasoning is that every member of the team should find their identity within the team and like to get that respect and positioning from others. It looks as if an invisible hierarchical system is being developed organically within the team and members understand their position within the team.

This is same reason why hiring decision are important to these teams.  Let me explain two of hiring mistakes. I hired highly knowledgeable person (He wrote several books as well) to high performance team and It was a disaster. He could not find the identity within the team.  Another example is of hiring resources with several awards and she also could not find identity within the team as well.

Challenges and common goal

High performers require challenges and recognition of their importance within the team. I have an experience to share here. A company was starting a very important initiative to go to Web visibility of application.  A meeting was called with few of the best minds in the company and I was the project manager in that effort.  Meeting also attended by few senior management folks because of the strategic importance. One of the team member slept in that meeting. After the conclusion of the meeting one of senior manager called me and asked me to officially warn the person slept in that meeting.  I thought that was not the right approach, instead I called resource and challenged him to make this project successful and promised to write great review based on the success and given the freedom to make any decisions.  He did that project successfully and several projects thereafter. He got high visibility within the company which excited him.  He created a self-goal to work as a change agent within company and act as catalyst to bring new ideas to company.  He also excited people around him to have similar goals.

Communication

Communication is the key in success of any high performance team.  That is why expected team size is 4-5, which makes smaller number of communication channels. Prompt and two way interactions resolve issues very quickly and make email communication to minimum.

Off-shore software development vendor selection process

Off-shore software development vendor selection process

Joseph Vargheese PMP CISA CSM

Atlanta, GA, USA

Dated: 2011-July-5

Email: joevgh@gmail.com

1.     Initial planning

• Number of resources and budget
• Type of project
• Complexity
• Development process
• Data Security
• Compliance

2.     Countries of preference

• India (Very high process maturity)
• China (Very cheap testing resources. Very good for Japan and Korea with no language barrier)
• Brazil (same time zone  with North America, Good for Infrastructure)
• Vietnam (Very good rates for medium skillset)
• Russia (Very cheap single digit per hour rate for email only communication)
• Costa Rica (Same time zone.   Medium skill set)

3.     Preference parameters 

• Quality of deliverables vs. cost
• Quality of manpower available
• Communication Overhead
• Overlapping hours of operation
• Process framework
• Information and Data Security infrastructure

4.     Primary screening process sources

• http://dqindia.ciol.com
• http://www.nasscom.in
• http://www.iaop.org
• http://www.sourcingbrazil.com
• http://www.outsourcebrazil.com.br/obwebsite/
• www.haygroup.com/cn
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Software_Industry_Association
• http://www.chnsourcing.com/top-series/top50/

5.     Right sizing a target vendor 

• Above 10 Millions :  Large companies above 50000 people
• 4 to 10 Million :  Companies with 10000 to 50000 people
• 1-4 Million Companies with 1000 to 10000 people
• < 1 Million: Companies below 1000 people

6.     Pre-screening process

6.1 Domain Expertise

Does the vendor have organization has expertise in the domain? example insurance, banking, healthcare etc…

6.2 Technology Expertise

Does vendor organization have expertise in the technology domain   Example: mainframe, client server, Web, Database etc..

6.3 Process Expertise

Does vendor organization have expertise in the process framework and exposure the development process used by client whether it Agile, Waterfall etc.

7.     Development methodology alignment

• Agile Development
• Waterfall Development
• RUP Development

8.     Cultural alignment
Please make sure cultural alignment is good with destination vendor organization including fast paced environment vs. highly process environment

9.     Training and development

Continuous infrastructure for training and development is key factor the success of the offshore environment due high employee turnover as high as 20%

10. Full RFP process

Full RFP process is recommended only for engagement above 2 million.  Engagements below 2 million a short RFP process will suffice.

11. Vendor presentation preparation

An agenda with short set of slides should be provided in advance for streamlining presentation material.

12. Global rate card

This point client should start collecting all possible needs for next two years with in organization and start getting pricing for the same.  It will be a tough negotiation  to get a better rate on a later time.

13. Vendor contract components

If it is not black and white, it can’t be enforced.

• Intellectual property rights
• Communication channels
• Overlapping hours
• Governance model
• Escalation Process
• Penalty for not performing
• Exit Criteria
• Offshore performance management
• Rate lock

14. Managing a vendor 

• Governance model  Implementation
• Escalation Process
• Formal issue reporting and tracking system
• Continuous staff training programs
• Key employee backup program
• KPIs
• Tuning of delivery model and process framework