On the surface level, the Agile methodology and offshore development may seem at odds with each other. However, many of these apparent roadblocks—if addressed correctly—can provide organizations with significant competitive advantages. Firms that are able to successfully manage geographically distributed engineering efforts across time zones, languages, and cultures have effectively built development teams that are responsive, staffed in multiple time zones, and resilient to centralized geographic risk.

Consider the following key tenets of the Agile methodology, taken directly from the Agile Manifesto:

• “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

This Agile tenet is less of a challenge these days for geographically distributed teams, as most organizations and teams have transitioned to virtual face-to-face conversations due to COVID-19 restrictions. However, Agile offshore teams had already become accustomed to virtual daily scrum stand-ups, backlog refinement meetings, and sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives prior to the pandemic. This allowed them to get a leg up on the competition, continuing with business as usual while localized teams were blindsided by the pandemic.

• “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

Geographic and time zone differences require specialized management to continuously align and course-correct distributed development efforts with the product owner’s vision, as well as the shifting needs and requirements of the business at large. Organizations looking to integrate offshore teams into their Agile development activities should start by first tackling distance and time zone issues as discussed below.

Social psychologists have long asserted that nonverbal communication make up two-thirds of all communication between individuals. And although face-to-face interactions can be more or less supplanted with video calls or meetings, critical communication cues and gestures are nonetheless absent in virtual conversations.

These vital cues are essential for building interpersonal relationships between team members. Suffice to say, physical distance diminishes the human element associated with Agile software development. Organizations with offshore Agile teams can therefore compensate for this deficiency using alternative methods (more on this later).

Failing fast, hard, and often is a key principle of Agile software development. Truth be told, this paradigm is uniquely American—in the U.S., technology professionals are, in principle, valued for their initiative and effort, with both positive results and failures celebrated as opportunities to learn and grow. U.S. technology startup founders, in particular, are accustomed to displaying their entrepreneurial failures as a badge of honor.

This credo is far from universal. For example, many cultures tend to take failures at face value, with personal shortcomings and deficiencies considered cause for termination. Similarly, team members may be reluctant to voice issues early on and prefer to hide existing knowledge gaps for the same reasons. Of course, this perspective and mindset is antithetical to an Agile team’s approach, where failures and missteps are considered opportunities for individual and team improvement.

Hiring the Right Offshore Team

Despite the cultural differences mentioned earlier, rapid globalization in recent years has given many offshore developers the opportunity to encounter, adopt, and embrace Agile and DevOps from their respective home countries. Subsequently, not all developers are bound to the trappings of their respective hierarchical cultures. Organizations with distributed Agile development teams should therefore take extra effort in recruiting remote developers with Agile mindsets.

Time zone issues and resulting scheduling conflicts are arguably the most prominent challenges related to Agile offshore teams. Fortunately, they are also the easiest to address. Some remediation tactics include the following:

• Have a liaison attend meetings: Conduct two or more daily stand-up sessions to accommodate teams in different geographic locations, with a liaison—ideally the scrum master—attending all of the meetings to verify, share, and document.
• Alternate meeting times: Simply put, meeting times can be alternated to facilitate daily stand-ups across the distributed team. For example, the team may hold one daily stand-up session during the domestic team’s regular business hours, and then alternate that arrangement for the offshore team.

While it’s true that the Agile Manifesto promotes individuals and interactions over processes and tools, the latter is especially critical for Agile organizations with offshore teams. Processes frameworks, such as Kanban or Scrum, are foundational in supporting the interactions among distributed and domestic team members. In the absence of a physical team presence, tools such as videoconferencing and project management software, are what make virtual communication and collaboration possible.

A critical element to effective communication is the establishment of proper rapport between team members. To this end, meeting facilitators (e.g., the scrum master, product/project manager, or product owner) should aim to start meetings with informal communications to foster interpersonal relationships between team members.

Along with daily scrum meetings and stand-ups, managers should encourage small group meetings for humanizing the interactions between developers, wherever they may be located.