I submited a new post at MuleSoft

I'm implementing Kanban at MuleSoft now. You can check out the posts I have so far there.

They are

• Implementing Kanban for Sustaining Engineering

• Kanban from the trenches; Lessons learned (Part 2)

Let me know if you like them!.

Also MuleSoft is hiring. Great place to work if you love technology and working with the latest.

The Deadly Silent Debt

I heard many times the concept of technical debt. I also realized it's terribly hard not to acquire it and it will keep increasing in your application all the time as you build it.

I will start with the first question...

What is technical debt?

Technical Debt is a detour from the right system to reduce development time.

It's called technical debt, because it behaves like a real monetary debt. You get a fully functional system without investing all the time and effort it needed to get it right. Just like a monetary debt, you need to return a capital plus interests. Depending on the amount of technical debt you acquire, the amount of interests will grow faster or slower. The sooner you pay your capital debt, the less you spend in interests. The longer it takes you to repay the technical debt, the interests will keep adding, making it at some point economically inviable to be repaid.

How do I acquire technical debt?

Well, as I said before, it's really easy to acquire it, temptation is always there to do the quick thing and keep going. I think there are four ways to increase your technical debt. A mix of intentionally, unintentionally, planned and unplanned.

Planned Intentional Technical Debt

The more formal definition of technical debt, implies it's consciously acquired to get something in the market faster to start making money sooner. That money that is made earlier on, will allow the company to survive or make the difference to repay the technical debt. Technical debt in this case, it's something planned and done intentionally. It's done as part of a business strategy which usually leads to a bigger profit. If it's planned correctly, and the risks are known it's not a bad thing.
Examples:

• We need to release the new version of the Iphone OS today, before Microsoft announces their Windows Phone 7 next week. We will add multitasking for Iphone 3GS now, and someday we will add it to the 3G too.
• We will release our next version of the application using the built-in user repository, and later on we will integrate it with CAS to support single sign on.

Planned Unintentional Technical Debt
Well, this is the the type of technical debt added into the system because of external constraints. It could be because you cannot get senior developers. It could be because another team in the organization needs something working in less than a week. It could be due to a corporate policy: We will only hire junior developers and train them.

We know we will be adding technical debt due to this constraints, so we plan for ways to reduce the capital we are borrowing. Also planning a way to repay the capital once the constraints are gone.


Examples:

• Junior members in the team might add technical debt because the lack of knowledge so we will do code reviews.
• Eventual tight deadlines might require the development team come up with a quick solution, and then refactor it to what we think is the right one.

Unplanned Intentional Technical Debt

In this case, I refer to the technical debt constantly added into the system. The unplanned intentional technical debt, is caused by constantly wrong desitions of management and the development team. This is the technical debt added when we are rushing things all the time. This is the type of debt added by the lack of a well defined development process or because it's not followed intentionally. This is the type of debt that rottens the guts of the systems and breaks the will of the ones who are trying to do the right system.
Examples:

• We will not be writing any test into the code because we are in a hurry this month. 
• Just add another if statement and move on, they want it today and we have a pile of work for 5 months waiting for us tomorrow.
• Submit the code now, I will do a quick check on the test server and then we promote it to production tomorrow.
• I need to leave early today, so I will submit my fix now, and someday I will fix it properly.
• I don't know how to use hibernate, so I will do it with a hardcoded SQL statement now, and hopefully someday somebody fixes it properly.

Unplanned Unintentional Technical Debt

This is very similar to the Planned Unintentional case. It's caused by the same constraints, but the big difference is that nobody plans or wants to spend time fixing them. This is due to resource constraints plus constant bad choices from the management team.
Examples:

• When we ask you to do the invoice module in two days, we thought you were doing it also right. 
• I cannot understand, you have 3 months of experience in java, and you never heard of the proxy pattern?. 
• I just added another IF there, there are already 30 of them in that method so I guess another one will do no harm.
• That java class with 10K lines of code started with just 5 lines a few years ago.

What can I do to reduce technical debt?

The first step would be to try to stop increasing the technical debt. I know, it's already a mess, all the developers complaint about it. Some of them would love to put the latest framework on it as it would be the silver bullet for your technical debt. And also, yes... you are right, each task will take you a lot longer now, as you need to fix countless problems for each thing you have to change. Yes, that's what you get by borrowing all the time and never paying it back. But, be sure that paying back some of it each time you have to do something, as little as it may seem, will make the difference

I can tell you how you can get more than 2 millions in technical debt. Borrowing one buck at a time. I can also tell you how you can repay it. Paying back one buck at a time. Of course, keep in mind it won't happen over night.

It's also very important to make technical debt as visible as possible. Having technical debt visible, will make the team to start taking it into account. Will help the team to stop increasing it.

Conclusions

I think planned debts, are not actually a problem in any company. Making technical debt part of your business strategy, when it's carefully planned, can be the difference of keeping your job in 2 months or not. Planning ways to mitigate technical debt your are not expecting and not doing intentionally is also a healthy way to do software development.

The unplanned debts are the problem. This is when technical debt is not considered and ignored by everybody. It becomes a deadly silent debt. It's deadly because the system will likely be considered to be rewritten even before it's finished, and it's silent because management doesn't want to hear about it. There is no worst deaf, than the one who doesn't want to hear. Without management knowing where you are, they will not plan ways to get you out of it.

Something is part of your behavior when you do it naturally and effortless. Something is part of your character, when it costs you more than you were willing to give for it. Managing and reducing technical debt must be engraved in management character, and not just part of it's behavior. That will be the only way for technical debt not kill your application.

Speed, it's all about speed!

In a previous post, I compared Agile methodologies with evolution in nature (Agile, Chaos and Evolution). There I compare the fitness of and organism with the amount of working software the team can deliver in an iteration. Increasing the amount of software delivered (I will call it velocity from now on) is equivalent to increasing life expectancy in nature.

This means velocity is critical for today's Software Development. If you want to last longer, you need to increase your velocity. The team needs to do everything they can to improve it.

Increasing the velocity, many times turns into a problem, rather than a solution. Instead of finding better and faster ways to do things, they just aim to cut what doesn't seem important, and you end up with thousands lines of code in production without any testing, documentation or even logic. That would be like trying to go faster with all your wheels flat. It might seem you go faster in the beginning, but you are putting in risk everybody on the car if the trip is long.

I will go over some concepts and show you some ways to improve your velocity without putting any life in risk. 

Closest Train Station

Imagine somebody asks you to take him to the train station. You can take him to any of the station of a particular train line. You will just look the closest one and take him there. You would never take him to the train station on the other side of the country! When you are doing software development, you are taking your customers to a train station. You need to find the closest one and go there. If you take them to the station on the other side of the country, you will waste a lot of work and time doing the train job. You need to take your customers to a point where they can keep going without you taking them all the way.

In this case, you are not affecting your speed, but you are traveling less distance, which in the end, achieves the same goal. You need to minimize the distance you have to take your customers. This is the equivalent of "the art of maximizing the amount of work not done" in the agile manifesto. The more things you don't do, the faster the customers get where they want.

Minimize Work in Progress

Work in progress are the tasks you are working at the same time. Any task you started working on and it's not yet used in production is considered work in progress. Having more WIP affects your velocity an quality. Another way to say the same to make it more generic is if "you have to still think or manage that story". Everybody on the team, will have to manage WIP, and waste time on it. If you do not manage it well, your quality and speed will decrease considerably. Also, it prevents people from being focused.

Once you finished working on a task, get it to the users as soon as possible, and stop thinking about it. This is in particular important, when you don't have automated regression tests and a good testing environment. Good testing policy could back up your work done 2 or 6 months later when the users get it.

WIP affects you not only by having to manage it, but also because it implies context switching. Context switching is a great source of bugs, and it reduces a lot your speed. You can easily verify this, with a simple and known exercise.

Prepare 4 pieces of paper and a stopwatch. With the first two pieces of paper write numbers in one and letters in the other one at the same time. Write a "1" in the first paper, and an "A" in the second all the way up to "10" and the letter "J". Measure the time it took you to complete it.
Then, with the other two pieces of paper, grab the first one and write numbers from 1 to 10, then the second and write letters from A to J, and again take the time it took you. You will clearly realize how context switching affects your speed and quality. As an example, it took me 29.82 secs to do the first part and only 16.23 sec the second part. It had also better quality, because I didn't have to rethink the letters every time I was writing them
You can imagine  context switching will be harder with complex development tasks. There will be more bugs because your context will not change completely and it will be harder to maintain it in your brain.

I think reducing WIP, increases your quality and velocity. I understand this it not easy, as there is always too many things to do, and they have to be done yesterday. But as I just showed you, doing all those things at the same time, will make you work more, think more and it will still take you longer. You will also do it with less quality.

Increase Quality to increase reusability and reduce rework
Lately, technology has been going really fast, allowing you to reuse almost any application you have and combine it with others to increase your flexibility and productivity. The only way to achieve this, is by building applications on top of other applications.

I could verify with many years of doing really large development projects, anything you didn't do a year ago, will take you two or three times the effort to correct it today. I will not also take you longer, but it will also have a great amount of bugs. All this because it was poorly requested, poorly developed, poorly tested, and poorly documented, so all the assumptions done a year or two ago to make it work will be lost.

Investing on doing the right thing, and doing it right in software development is the only way you will be able to build things on top of your application. If you don't do the right thing, you will spend a lot of time changing and fixing it, and probably throwing away a lot of what has already been done. This will not allow you to have the time to build something else on top of it.
If you don't do it right, you end with something complex, full of bugs, no documentation, no tests, no knowledge to allow you to build on top of it either. Both cases imply a lot of rework. Reducing rework translates in to doing less and reusing more. The only way to reduce rework is by making quality a pillar of your process.

Conclusions

Increasing your velocity is the only way to last longer on IT. Still, this doesn't mean doing it recklessly. Even an old lady can push the accelerator pedal to the bottom and go up to 150 miles, but I wouldn't like being on the car when it happens. You have to do like race drivers and practice all the time trying to do the perfect turn. Only trying to make it better you will be able to go faster. It will not happen on your first iteration, or the second. First try to get to a stable point, where you are doing the right thing right. Then practice will allow you to go faster and see better ways to do things. If you just stop doing important pieces to go faster, you only foolish yourself.

Value, what is value?

When you get to work with Agile methodologies, you start hearing a magic word all the time. The word "Value" in agile methodologies is what drives everything. What makes "Value" so magical? Lets see what is behind that word by starting with the  dictionary definition. There are many definitions there but I think this is the one that applies in this case:

"relative worth, utility, or importance" 

This is where everything gets hard with an agile methodology. The definition says it's a relative, but relative to what? Everybody will gets a difference sense of value, because everybody measures it with a different stick.

The business user measures value, in something that will allow him to work less and make the same or more money. A developer will see value on using the latest technology. A DBA will see more value on having a well defined DB schema. A Project Manager will see value following a process and become predictable. A QA guy will see value in a testable application. But, which of all those values is the one you should care about when working in software development? We got into a worst place, because everyone seems to have different objectives while they do their work.

Now, which of all the different values is the right one? Well, I think all of those at the same time, but each one with a relative worth. Now lets look at the first principle of the Agile Manifesto to get a better understanding of which value is important

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software."

This means the value the customer gets, it the most important one. So we need to build everything around that. Still, that is not something simple, and it takes a lot of effort to satisfy a customer. Who will put in all that effort to achieve this important goal? That's the whole team working together. But as we know, not all teams are able to overcome all the problems in the process of satisfying a customer. Something else should be added to this mix, and that is team commitment. Without the team working at full steam, it will be really hard to satisfy a customer and be profitable at the same time. There is also another principle in the agile manifesto related to this.

"Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done."

Which is the trick for that? is there any recipe to build a committed team? That's something everybody struggles with, when they are building a team. I think the word "Value" comes into play again. To have motivated people in your team, they need to get value from the project.

How can you align each team member's value with the customer's value? I think that is what management should be focused on through the whole project. The best management is the one that achieves that. This is also not an easy task. Because management is not measured by value, it's measured by numbers. They are often so trapped into those numbers, that they forget what really matters.

"Value" can be many things, acts and even just feelings. I could be just being listened or listen. It can be a mountain touching the sky or bytes stored in a hard drive. The only way to find out what it is, it to talk, dig and look for it. This is probably the biggest challenge for a manager, find out where is value for everybody in the team and align that with the value for the customer. Once you get to that point, you will see a successful project all around.




References
http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/value
http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

The definitive Corporate IT Firefighter guide

A firefighter in real life, is a person dedicated to extinguish fires caused intentionally or unintentionally. The Corporate IT firefighter does the same. Here is a guide for all the IT firefighters around the globe.

The IT Firefighter theme
"All the effort is dedicated to the most important fire. Then we run to the next fire."

Here is the process IT firefighters follow everyday. We start with the most important thing a firefighter needs to know to be the best as his job. That's knowing :

How to prioritize a Fire?

Fires can have multiple sources on IT. The best way to prioritize fires is analyzing the source. The source of the fire is more important than the size of it, that's why the source is vital to determine the fire priority. A good practice is working with an organization chart. The organization chart is like the real life firefighter cloth, it prevents you from getting burnt too fast. The standard procedure is matching the name of the person that triggers the alarm with the names in the org chart. The higher the box matching that name, the higher the priority. All the fires you are not working on are kept in a backlog, which we cleverly named it the Burning backlog. We will focus then on the fire at the top of the backlog, while all the others wait in the burning backlog to be extinguished.

Once you get to be an experienced firefighter, you will develop improved methods to prioritize backlogs. I met a couple of IT firefighters that used the title of the person reporting a fire but unfortunately they are not working on IT anymore. This is because titles lately became meaningless in companies. For example the only tester in the company now is called Vice President of Quality Assurance. So as a general rule, don't pay attention to titles.

Also you might run into the case, where two fire alarms were triggered by two people at the same level. The best way to solve this case, is to look who has more boxes below him in the org chart. It's also highly important if your name appears in one of those boxes, because that could change the more boxes rule.

With this guidelines, you will be able to successfully prioritize fires in your corporation. 

Fire Alarm response procedure

Whenever there is a new alarm, you need to prioritize it. If the priority is higher than your current fire, you need to grab all your stuff and run to fight the new one. Remember our theme, we alway fight the most important fire. Wasting time in the other fires is not well seen in the IT Firefighting Union, and could get as bad as lose your annual bonus if there is one.

Once the new fire has been prioritized, you need to send a response to the person who set the alarm to calm him during this troubling time. Your response should be "We are working on it, and we will have a solution as soon as possible". That will make you look good, even when you are not even close to work with it or know what the problem is.

Make it a learning experience
Corporations usually have two policies. One is the "no training" policy, and the other is the "no training now" policy. Either way, you will not get any training for most of your tasks, if not all. So, what do you need to do to learn from experience?
When you are working on a fire, you need to be really dedicated, and not just look at the fire, but what caused it. So you will start learning what you should never do in your applications. Things like:

• Catching exceptions and never log any error.
• Building your own internal web framework based on struts.
• Your own XML parser or ORM tool.
• Your own IoC lightweight container.

All those might have a reasonable explanation when they decided to do them, but in the end, you learn they become a big source of fires. Once you see a big source of fire, look at it, understand it, and search somewhere what would be the best way to do it, so it doesn't cause more fires. That will be the closest you will get to training unfortunately. If you are lucky you will get a chance to properly fix them.

Live with it and climb the corporate ladder
Being on Corporate IT is not an easy job. Just like a real life firefighter. Nobody wants to pay for your work or care about your well being. But as soon as they get into a fire, they will call you right away and thank you gratefully once you extinguished it.

Once you become popular in the corporation, everybody will call you and talk about you. If you always follow these simple guide and keep up with the hard work, you future is assured and you will get high in the corporate ladder.

Seriously... if you are working as a firefighter in IT, don't sign up for the union. Become a planner, and work on plans. Planning is looking ahead, firefighting is looking backwards.

What am I doing here?

Have you ever been on a project where everything seems to be wrong? A project when even doing the right thing seems wrong? A project where nobody does one thing completely without problems? A project that is so complex and big that nobody is able to see how the pieces fit together? A project where as soon as there is a change in any piece everything else start failing? A project where nobody feels responsible for anything? A project where managers just want you to do something with one goal "make him look good in front of upper managers"? A project full of wishes but no requirements? A project you are not proud of being part of? A project everybody ask themselves... What am I doing here? Well, I have been in projects like this, and I would like to share my thoughts on it.

I would like to start with a story.

The Story

There was an ancient community living on a desert. They always saved a lot of water on the rainy season because they knew they had to survive with it when the dry season comes. They did that year after year for long time. They had to work really hard, and moderate their use of water to be able to survive.

A particular year, an elder of the community started to practice a ritual. A ritual dedicated to the god of rain. It consisted on stepping over a small rock, and pray to the god of rain very hard. If his prayer were good, then a big rain will start. The elder knew when there was about to be a rain, and he used that trick to convince people the god of rain existed. Therefore many people started to believe in the god of rain, and thinking he will be able to give them rain on the dry season.

That year, the community saved lot of water for the dry season, while the elder keep praying to the god of rain before each rain. Somehow that year they had rains over the dry season, so everybody was really happy and celebrated. They finally found a solution to their problem. They just have to pray over a small rock to the god of rain. The god of rain was going to give them rain whenever they need it.

The dry season didn't appear for many years. It was a great time for the community, because they finally got time to do other things, things they always wanted to do. After a couple of years, everybody forgot about the dry season or saving water.

A few years have passed, and they started to stop praying to the god of rain, because they had more important things to do. They were doing things like looking for the best outfit or coffee in town. Unfortunately, a dry season came back, and the whole community started to run out of water. They thought it was because they stop praying, so they started praying to the god of rain again. Another month passed, and they look at the elder for answers, what is happening? Why is not raining now? We are running out of water. The elder had the answer for them, "you are not praying hard enough, or you are praying over the wrong rock". Everybody run for find a rock to pray on it as hard as they could, but still they couldn't get any single drop of water from the sky.

A few months later, everybody was desperate for water. Everybody in the community blamed everybody else, because other don't pray as hard as they. The elder kept telling them, they were not praying right, so the god of rain got mad at them. Many people from the community left it in search for water somewhere else. The ones who stayed died before the next rainy season arrived.

What does the story has to do with my failing project?

You might be asking, "What does the story has to do with my failing project?"

Blame everybody else

The first thing that happens when project starts failing is everybody points their fingers to others. People blame others, because nobody followed the process as hard and good as they did. Nobody wants to be responsible for anything, because they know it will be used against them. Everybody always have a reasonably good excuse not to do things right. Nobody is able to backup what they did in the project. Bottom line, nobody and everybody at the same time is responsible for the project failure. As you go up in the hierarchy, more weight you have in the results of the project, so more responsible you should feel.

A process leading to nothing
Nobody ever asked themselves if there is actually a god of rain. They blamed how others followed a process dedicated to a god that does not exist. None was capable to realize there is no god of rain, and they had to start collecting water again to save them. Nobody wanted to challenge the elder just like nobody challenges managers. And if you do have the guts to do it, most of the time your manager will put you aside, because that is not the right attitude. They will also tell you it is because you are not praying hard enough. It will never be because they are asking you to go in the wrong direction, in a direction that only creates more problems. It seems like being wrong is the worst sin for a manager.

The Parasites
There will be plenty of villagers telling their peers, "I always knew this was going to happen". That was their excuse to do nothing, neither collecting water, nor praying over rocks. I'm sure you have this type of people in your failing project. They are parasites, they live from others effort, and they are no able to do anything on their own. Everything is always wrong, or others made it so complex, that they are not able to explode all their potential. They limit themselves to do the least possible, because they do not feel valued. They could also spend their time doing a side project for their aunts to organize weekend dressmaking workshops. The only way to get value from parasites is to push and control them all the time. You might need to evaluate how much time a manager has to waste to have a parasite doing something right.


The Followers
These are the guys who just follow orders. They do their work, and leave on time. They are committed to do what is asked, but they will not seek for any highness at work. They are there to do what they are paid for. With a good direction, followers will be enough to save your project. Still, as soon as the project gets into trouble, they quickly search for other places to work. Their commitment to the project increases as they get benefits from it. If they are not enough benefits for them to justify staying, they will leave.

The Lifesavers
If you are lucky, there will also be a few member unconditionally committed to the project. They will be overloaded, trying to get the water out of the sinking boat. The parasites will stick to these guys, because they know those can help them. Lifesavers will be able to fix whatever they can't. The lifesaver will assume the responsibility of the job because that's what they naturally do. It is easy to recognize a lifesaver, will be the one everybody asks questions, the one everyone runs for help. He might not be able to do things perfectly, but he is able to do things. Once the lifesaver passes his limits, he will leave searching for water somewhere else. If you are not able to create an environment to maintain them, you will only keep the parasites that are not even able to leave. Once you run out of lifesavers, the project will just sink faster.

Process Managers
There is an elder telling them which process to follow and they weren't doing it right. Same thing you get from your manager when the project is failing. They define or inherit a process to follow for the project, and they think by just following the process they will lead to results. They only focus on the process adherence, instead of looking to add value to the project.

They spent their time updating reports, and asking for time logs, status updates, and looking at to-do lists. They do not care what the lists are about, or why you had to spend twice as time as you should. They never review what has to be done, just review if the process was followed. They do not attempt to create a process to add value and reduce waste. They just aim to copy something they learn from internet or on a two day course. If there is no value in the project coming from managers, then for sure the project will fail.

The only way they know to save a project from failing is to push the team harder. Sometimes this works, because parasites need to be pushed to get them doing something. Most of the time, they only get something from the lifesavers, putting those on the verge to leave.

Value comes from people, not from the process. The process will only help to increase or decrease the value from people. If your team cannot create value, then the process is useless and might just waste the little value the team has to give. If you cannot get value from the team, then you need to stop, reconsider and start again.

Is leaving the only option?

First think what a project is. A project is created with an objective to generate value, with a time frame and limited resources. Projects are used in companies just to give work a frame or boundaries, to make it measurable and manageable.

Can a team provide products or services without doing it in a project? Yes, they can, and they are probably better without projects, because they can really focus on what is needed when it's needed.  They will be completely based on value driven work.


Some companies are project driven, some are value driven, some are wish driven and some are not driven at all. If a project does not have an objective to create value, a time frame, and resources well defined, then you should reconsider your project, and call it a wish.

Wishes are the main cause of failure, because a wish is hard to express and understand. A wish is not measurable or manageable. They are hidden as projects and the lack of measure gives management the sense of everybody is not working hard enough. Management sets an impossible end date to make the lazy team work hard. That generates the sense of failing to all the team. This causes every body to run and trash things to get to that impossible date making things worst.

Your management expects everything to be done by the end of the time frame without committing to the project at all stages. Your management only focuses on process adherence and not on how to get more value from the team. Your are working on a wish without realistic planning and measurable goals. Your company does not create an environment to keep the guys who can make a difference. You should start asking yourself  what am I doing there?

Offshore Development - Dream or nightmare?

I've been working doing offshore development for 5 years already. Through those years, I learned some really valuable lessons. In this post I will try to go over the benefits and problems it arises.
I will start with the first question you should ask yourself before considering offshoring.

Why do you want to do offshore development?
There could be many answers to this question. You could answer you are an NGO doing charity, giving people across the glove a good salary and a good life, because they are from a country with few opportunities. You could be an open source application and find a great committer in a remote location. You could say it's because you cannot find enough skilled people to do the work you need in your own country. But most of the cases it's just to cut costs. You want the same you get from a developer in your own country, but pay him a lot less. Even if it’s because you need to scale up and down as you need, offshoring is about cutting costs. People waiting until you want to scale up costs money too, same as scaling down when you don’t need them anymore. Yes, this does not sound idealist. It is not to make the world a better place. It's just to save money for wealthy rich people. Ok, I think I made the cost cutting idea clear. I'm not against cutting costs; actually I would love to be able to do the same with taxes. Now, this takes us to the second question you should ask yourself.

Do the savings justify all the hassle you get into by offshoring?
I would say it does. That's why many companies are offshoring right now, and more and more after the global crisis are trying to do it. Salaries of offshore developers range from 1/2 to 1/5 compared to developers in Europe or United States; this is depending on which country you offshore to. By just looking at initial numbers, it seems like it's the best deal of the world. Why wouldn't you save a lot of money on your overpaid IT salaries?  So far things had never been a dream with your local developers. That takes you to your third question.


What do I have to lose by offshoring?
The worst thing that could happen, it is to waste all the money you invest in the project. Normally, you will not get what you wanted. A very few times, you will get a decent application that meets your needs. You could also risk losing all your local people who knows about the application, the business and the project if you do no make them part of the bigger picture.  There is one thing for sure; many things will be more complex to do. If you are not able to overcome the increased complexity, you are more likely going to get something really different than what you ask for. Development will also take a lot more time than you initially thought it would.

Which things are more complex by offshoring?

The most complex thing is communication. Communication is not only about being able to talk over the phone in this case. It is being able to send a message, and that message being understood on the other side of the world. It’s not only about speaking the same language; it’s about being able to share the same language. If the team does not have a common language, everything else will be harder to share. By doing offshore development, you are already starting in disadvantage. The offshore team usually not only speaks a different language, they also haven't met personally the onsite members. If the team members are not able to leverage themselves by sharing their knowledge, then the distance between local and offshore will increase.

The time zone difference is also a factor that could complicate things. If you share most of your working hours with the offshore, you can consider them nearshore. If you shre little or none working hours with your offshore team, then you think about farshroe. Nearshore is simpler, and easier to manage compared when you do farshore.

If you want to do software development, you need to reduce as much as you can the differences between local and offshore teams. Reducing the differences will allow you to create a common language faster. First, think about one team, and not “them” and “us”. If you start it like this, you are already making differences. If you cannot trust your offshore team to do design, why would you trust them to implement your design? The more differences you are not reducing, the harder the communication gets. If you like lean software development, think about differences between local and remote teams as waste.

Culture is also a big difference to overcome. If you say “are you crazy?” some people could think they are doing everything wrong, when you actually wanted to tell them it is great. Some cultures also make people shy, because they are not able to freely express their feelings.  They reflect that on their work too, so you need to be twice the time more open to suggestions that you would normally do with people from your own country to get the desired effect. Again, building a common language is critical.

Which are the consequences of not having a common language?
The offshore team will go much slower and also going in wrong directions. Going in the wrong direction in software development makes the team work twice to get it back on track. This could mean your local team has to do this work because the offshore team will keep going in the wrong direction, or investing more time having your offshore doing it better. This could be the main cause offshoring your project could be more expensive than doing it right locally.

A lot of time will be wasted in communication to assure the offshore team understands what they need to do. This could mean endless meetings between local and offshore members discussing and trying to understand what is needed. If the team shares the same language communication time is reduced greatly and is more effective. Also endless meetings over the phone drive local and offshore teams crazy too. Nobody likes to be in a meeting over the phone for 6 hours, especially when it is in a different language. People get lost in the middle of the meeting. Details get more important than important things. Then you end up with your offshore team working on pointless details instead of things which add value to your business.

The offshore team will not be able to add value to the application. The offshore team only does improvements when they come from the local team as the direction to go. They do not know enough to improve things on their own, and communicate them effectively. Over time, any improvement attempt will stop, and they will only work on the requirements as they come. You need to get to the point where the offshore team is able to suggest and implement changes and fixes. If you are not at this point, you need to keep working on building a common language.

How do I build a common language?
The best way to build a common language, is to have your team interact. This does not mean talk over the phone, it means getting them to know each other. The best way to share things is by face to face contact. So the best thing is to get the team in the same place for some time and have them working together. This should be as mixed as possible, and aim to have everybody interacting with everybody as much as possible. Sometimes having the whole team traveling and staying onsite could be expensive. If you cannot afford it, then try to get onsite the offshore key players. They would be able to solve team differences faster when they are back at home. This also should not be once in a lifetime; bounds need to be reinforced periodically. This gives the offshore team a sense of belonging which is really important. If you don’t think you are part of something, you will hardly commit to it at a point where you make a difference.

Video conference is also very important, because it gives faces to the voices. It’s easier for a person to relate to another face than just to a voice on the phone or a signature on an email. It will help also to share the body language, which is sometimes as important as the words coming out from a mouth.

People on IT are known to be hard to deal with. They are not very eloquent, they do not have great acting skills; they are not best speakers. Why would you think it will be different in your case? If you do not invest on building a common language, the communication problem will be really hard to overcome. Initiatives will lose momentum right after they start making things harder to change the course of the project.

Is Offshore development a dream or a nightmare?
It will certainly not be a dream. It will allow you to reduce costs, making some projects possible. It will allow you to access really good development teams at an affordable price. If you are able to build a common language for the whole team, you will be able to reduce your costs considerably, and also be able to reduce the time things take to be developed. Building a common language is the most important thing when doing offshore, if you get to do it, you will get great results. If you omit this step in your offshore development, things will more likely turn into a nightmare.

As I said in the beginning, offshore is all about cutting costs but if you cut them too much, you will get the undesired effect. Frequent travels, reducing differences between local and offshore teams, video conferencing do make a difference when you build a common language. Not having a common language makes things take a lot longer, be more expensive and less likely to be what you expected.

Is it possible to do distributed Scrum or Agile software development?
I would not ask if it is possible, I think it is a must. As I said before, building a common language is all about the people interacting. Scrum and Agile, are in their roots about the same. Having daily short focused meetings allow people to build a common language. Visibility of project status and progress is clear, because you measure it with working software. Many practices from agile methodologies are of great help, such us continuous integration, testing, pair programming. These practices also help to build a common language, and reduce time spent trying to see which change broke everything since the last time the code was tested all together.

Waterfall is about interacting through documents. Documents are the worst way to build a common language. Documents hide differences, and they are often seen at the end, when you are already late to mitigate them. Maintaining documents is a tedious task and costs money too. You will also spend a lot of time on long meetings trying to explain what the document is about, instead of discussing what it's needed. Visibility of progress and project state becomes very fuzzy, I could send a document saying everything is about to be done, when it’s not close to it.

Conclusions
Doing offshore development is not only about the salary of your IT people. If you just look at that, you will only get the false perception of cost reduction. If you do not invest on building a common language, there are other things you will have to consider. Development will take longer than you initially thought. You will get a different product than you expected. Offshore development is not a dream or a nightmare. It is just like anything else, if you do it right, it will resemble a dream, if you do it wrong, it will be closer to a nightmare.