Pragmatic Outsourcing

Peace in Metrics

Agile techniques and approaches are marching across the software land conquering more and more territories. It was not a blitzkrieg forefathers of agile has dreamed of but it is a successful invasion. Along with true agile aficionados with their well thought out and understood processes the crowds of software anarchists disguised as agile evangelists are capturing organizations by storm. Picking selected items from the agile menu they bask in glory of self-respect enjoying coding / refactoring dance leaving aside schedules, deliverables, and milestones. While religiously following 40-hour work weeks and iteration retrospectives they enjoy weeping sounds of deadlines as they fly by.

While agile made a huge positive impact on software development as any other broad initiative it created some serious problems and could not avoid significant collateral damage. One of the first victims to the new brave world were the software metrics. Indeed, why do you need metrics in a self-monitoring organization with a clear measure of success – the working product? Even Tom DeMarco backed off from some of his ideas, why should not you? … And maybe that’s why it took agile community such a long time to figure out that test-driven development is ridiculously expensive…

Combining agile and offshore is not at all impossible. It is however complex and requires a plenty of prerequisites, including serious agile maturity of the on-shore team. You should think twice before eliminating “overhead” of the waterfall on your offshore projects. And specifically, forgoing the metrics can be detrimental / border line juvenile delinquency.

Of course the topic metrics is also complex and rather controversial. What to measure? How to measure? What to do with the results? Here are a few tips to consider:

Read more »

August 19, 2009 Posted by Nick Krym | Managing Offshore Engagements | Offshore Tips | 1 Comment