Adopting Agile in Distributed Development

Abstract

Key challenges of finding right skilled resources and the cost arbitrage factors have made distributed software development indispensable for quite some time now. The success stories of many offshore service providers particularly from India underlines the fact that this is working well in a "hands-free" mode, especially for projects following traditional development life cycles. The recent trend is an increase in the number of organizations adopting agile methodologies to tackle the challenges of requirements volatility and shorter time to market. However, the concept of a collocated team which is central to agile does not easily translate to distributed development. This paper captures our experience at Wipro in handling Distributed Agile projects. We discuss a validated model to make a smooth transition from a collocated to a distributed scenario in agile projects. We also share the lessons learnt and best practices that we have gained in implementing this model.