Agile Development as a culture

Agile is the label given to a growing number of methodologies with names like Scrum, Crystal, Adaptive, Feature-Driven Development and Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) among others.

These new development approaches are based on the premise that if you have competent developers, you can presume that they know how to write code. The problems your developers encounter, therefore, aren’t coding issues and most likely will be organizational and communication ones, and those are what the agile approaches attempt to address.

This is definitively a process where the culture of the organization weighs too much to have a working model, and the way the client has been traditionally involved changes dramatically. If on top of that you add another factor like offshore/outsourcing resources, the concept is even more interesting and challenging.

The question many clients ask when thinking of outsourcing and Agile development is: How can I have a collaborative, flexible, rapid and adaptive model when my team, or part of it, is located thousands of miles from my office, sometimes working in different schedules, coming from a different culture, living in a country where English is not the primary language, and not knowing the business as well as we do?

It is a very good question. In fact, these are the types of questions that have driven the Isthmus Agile development model.

Velocity, flexibility, agility, adaptability are concepts mentioned very often in fancy sales presentations from some outsourcing providers, but when you go deeper and start asking the right questions about how the day-to-day work is translated into those conditions, the answers are not always clear or satisfactory.

The answer is simple: Agile development, in a nearshore model, is not just a matter of working with iterations, having releases from time to time, applying unit testing, and having planning games and iterations reviews every week. For an agile model that involves nearshore resources, and distributed teams, all the participants (and especially the nearshore provider) must understand that agile, more than a model or an approach to develop software must be an integral part of the culture of the team and of the entire company.

Methodologies, tools, processes, certifications, and standards are tools that are very powerful if well used, but in the end, projects are a matter of people dealing with people, and this what makes projects more interesting and sometimes more complex.

The engineers, project managers, architects, senior executives, the receptionist, the secretary, essentially everybody in the outsourcing provider organization must understand this very clear and must live by that. Otherwise, the promise of value added, more velocity, more flexibility and more agility won’t happen.

A fundamental precept of services is that the customer is the judge of the value. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, if that hard work is not translated into something that the client cannot tangibly perceive as valuable then the promise will only stay in your sales Powerpoint presentation.

What Makes Isthmus Different

The Outsourcing experience and agile development involve challenges that are faced in the day-to-day operation. The most relevant challenges, from our experience, are:

1. Communication:

This involves language Barriers and sometimes the need from many offshore firms to have onshore “point people” who speak English. This is often a sign that the day-to-day dealing with offshore project managers, or engineers, frequently breaks down.

Big differences in time zones also often hinder the communication process because the provider’s team will be working while the client’s team is sleeping and vise versa.

There’s an additional, critical factor regarding communication. It is not just a matter of the language or the time zones. The “I feel good communicating with these guys” is something that goes beyond the right command of the English language. It is the “I understand what you mean and what you want. You understand what I mean so we can start working right away, with no delays translating or explaining more than needed”.

Something that our clients value tremendously is the ease of communicate with our engineers. Their capacity to understand what the client is explaining or asking, their competency to provide ideas on different approaches based on previous experiences, and their commitment to make things happen is essential to us adding value.

How do we see communication at Isthmus?

We have a “Client-centric” approach with permanent and direct interaction in English with all levels of the company including Engineers, Project Managers, QA, Architects, and Executive Management. No “translators” or onsite “facilitators” are needed.

We are in this together and we ask our clients to involve us as much as possible, providing us with as much access to the big picture of your business as they can. That way we will be able to provide much more value in return, letting you know our ideas, our experience and suggestions, becoming an extension of your development organization, transcending the “us’ and “them” model.

In the present world, change is inherent to Projects. We promote allowing the client to determine the value that they want/need from the project team in Costa Rica with an ongoing assessment of these needs and a flexible approach to modify the plans if needed. This is at the heart of agile development and we perfectly understand it and adopt it in an assertive way.

2. Time zone and Distance Challenges:

Traditional offshore providers serving the US are usually located in drastically different time zones that generate delays in communication or complications in setting up effective meetings.

Long travel distances often obligate the client to schedule travels of at least 1 week at the offshore location, but the management of a team in Costa Rica is very convenient.

· It is simpler, faster and cheaper to travel to Costa Rica from the US than to India, Eastern Europe, or China. As opposed to other countries, Costa Rica is a very safe destination.

· Costa Rica is located in Central Standard Time.

· 2.5 – 5 Hours Flight from major US Cities.

· Direct Flights from major US cities.

A normal situation for many of our clients is that they can take a plane early in the morning, be in Costa Rica by noon, work all afternoon, all morning next day, catch up with the team and the project, and take the same plane the very next day to the US.

3. Cultural Barrier Challenge:

The effect of different cultures may affect the communication process and the ease needed to work effectively in an agile world.

Cultural barriers can be evident, or much subtler, such as when, “We will have problems implementing this” may actually be a polite way of saying, “We can’t do this…” or “I don’t have a clue on how to do this”

Other cultural barriers arise when finer points or nuances are misunderstood due to thinking within a different framework, especially when project failures or problems occur, and the need to communicate setbacks arise.

Costa Rica has a Westernized culture historically aligned with the US. Tourism brings 2 million people every year and the majority of those people come from the US.

Also, Costa Ricans have a culture that facilitates communication in a respectful but straightforward way. We speak our minds in a respectful way if we see there are different ways to do things, based on our experience and knowledge.

It is what we call the “Tico Touch” (“Tico” is a colloquial term for a native of Costa Rica) that represents our way of doing business, the friendliness, the openness to communicate effectively, the transparency we strive for in business relationships, and the understanding of the value we need and we want to add.

Our clients like to visit us, to work with us. The country is secure, the food is great, the people are nice, and the landscape is beautiful.

4. Collaborative model:

It has long been believed that agile programming cannot be delivered (well) by means of outsourcing because of the different barriers outsourcing is supposed to have. The teams are distributed in different geographical zones and it is always hard to avoid the “Us” and “Them” between the onsite and the offsite teams.

If you add very different time zones, long distances, and different cultures, the process of creating one single team is even harder.

The Collaborative Model at Isthmus is based on 6 years of experience in this business, working for many different clients in different industry verticals, developing complex projects with teams of different sizes, using many different technologies.

Our main focus in every business relationship is to become an integral extension of our client’s Development and Testing group. We have proved that distance is not a barrier when both parties want to effectively collaborate.

Different tools may help the process but in general terms it is the people, the culture, the approach and the interest of our team and the client’s team that makes collaboration easier and things happen.

Our engineers participate as any regular team member in the different dynamics of an agile project: the planning sessions, the iterations reviews, the velocity analysis, the stand up meetings, the peer reviews, the backlog review, the story boards definition and review, the SAMOLO’s and other practices.

Something that someone who has worked first with the traditional waterfall approach for software development and then with the Agile approach knows is that the moment you work with Agile, you become another person. After that first experience, if it was well managed, you don’t want to go back to traditional development, you become an evangelist of agile…

Well… at Isthmus, our engineers have tried the difference of agile and they love it, probably as much as you do. They would say they don’t want to go back to the “dark side” of the force!!