Archive - June 2015

In my previous post I told you about Scrum advantages. But there are a lot of issues when people try to use Scrum on their projects. Scrum is ideal when a company is developing a product for itself, when there are no outsourcing, deadlines and distributed teams. But when you try to use Scrum with outsourced development, things are getting more and more complicated. So, the Project Manager should keep in mind that there might be some false hopes of Scrum (this topic is covered here).

I have a half dozen projects in my portfolio, and today I will share my experience of Scrum in real life with you.
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You already know that offshore software development brings the following benefits:

• Cost reduction when working with competitive labor markets;
• Unlimited access to highly specialized professionals;
• Maximizing the efficiency of time zone differences – less production down time.

Together with that, it brings certain challenges you should be aware of:

• The need for constant management and control (in particular, time and budget);
• Cultural differences (which were covered in one of our previous articles);
• Lack of face-to-face contact.

Let’s talk about control in more depth.
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Classic waterfall software development approach originates in the manufacturing industry and is sequential by its nature. Phases follow one after another: requirements gathering, design, implementation, test, deploy. But currently this process doesn’t meet the needs of modern business. A medium sized project can last for a year, larger projects can take even more time to be completed. In a year original detailed functional requirements are often completely outdated. You can get a product that you don’t need.

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