Offshoring Software Development: An Agile Approach to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Digital capabilities, resources, and agile methodologies were in high demand due to the COVID-19 impact. 

Reason? Companies needed impetus to grow – and shift their outtakes, and preferences. Thus, in terms of year-over-year growth, IT services are the fastest-growing sector in the overall IT business, followed by mainly enterprise software.

There seems to be an underlying trend to this.

In 2022, global spending on IT services will total around 1.2 trillion US dollars, showing an 11.2 percent increase over 2020. It also had an impact on the IT-outsourcing market revenue, which is estimated to reach 413.7 billion dollars by 2022.

But the development and the hiring is not necessarily in-house.

Many businesses are shifting their software development efforts overseas in order to save money, time, and improve their product development processes. Because of the increased demand for skilled developers in the market, offshore outsourcing provides access to a larger pool of tech talent.

Offshore Software Development: A Perfect Way to Boost Your Business

By creating high-quality MVPs, offshore software development is a good way to boost your competitiveness and save money on operating costs. It also allows the company to experiment, develop new features, and work on the backlog for short and long-term initiatives without worrying about human resources.

Offshore software development might be challenging for some people to manage due to the numerous hurdles and risks involved. How can businesses take a more agile approach to software development offshore? How they may improve their work with dedicated teams significantly? To know this, stay connected—

What is the Agile Offshore Development Approach?

Agile software development is a catch-all word for frameworks and best practices derived from the Agile Manifesto’s 12 principles. The collaboration of multiple self-organized teams is at the heart of this technique. It is divided into multiple iterations, with each iteration producing a finished product component.

And what exactly does that mean? There are a number of benefits such as:

• Control over the development process at a higher level. After one iteration, you can see or feel the outcomes. If necessary, make adjustments/iterations to the requirements.
• Quick problem-solving is possible with a collaborative environment that allows the entire team to stay on the same page, be aware of issues, and respond to emergent concerns.
• The process is extremely adaptable. Agile development allows a team to adjust swiftly to changing market conditions and, as a result, mitigate potential risks.
• Costs and timeliness are both flexible. It’s exceedingly tough to anticipate the project’s completion date if you’re working on a complex software solution. Instead, your team can work in short iterations, giving you more control over your time and money.
• Products of excellent quality. Minor and big improvements can be made quickly with the help of Agile development. As soon as you collect customer feedback, your team will be ready to make essential improvements.

The agile approach helps remote development teams with a better way to build software products. It offers a clear structure that supports iterative development and team cooperation while focusing on product quality and efficiency.

Ways to Leverage Agile Offshore Development Team

1) Define the scope of work (SOW)

Before beginning work on an agile project with a remote development team, it’s important to figure out how many tasks need to be accomplished by a certain date. This stage aids in the development of a complete work strategy, often known as the Scope of Work (SOW).

The scope of work is a document that contains information on the project’s work to be done. It’s the first agreement on the duties that must be completed by a certain date.

Here’s what the SOW document should contain;

• Dates mentioned with project milestones
• A list of deliverables for each milestone
• The reporting method

Each milestone will then be broken down into smaller chunks known as iterations. It enables the creation of a basic plan with particular activities for each iteration, making it easy to prioritize and reorganize those tasks as needed.

Quick plug: Our team has decades of experience helping organizations build Teams of high-quality IT professional/s (onshore, offshore, nearshore) that align well with their business goals and culture. You can also reach out to us to build your team by learning more about our other engagement models to avail.

2) Make an Easy-to-Follow Product Roadmap

The product roadmap is a high-level overview of the requirements that must be met in order to realize the product vision. It’s a strategic document that acts as a step-by-step roadmap for the project, outlining long- and short-term objectives & how to attain them.

It’s a big, adaptable visual depiction of your project that you can change over time as your needs, tech stack, or deadlines change.

A roadmap provides a visual depiction of the project’s progress. An agile development team can break each iteration into various sprints at this point. Its main purpose is to provide all members of the offshore development team with a comprehensive image of the product development process.

3) Effective Communication is Essential

The Agile methodology encourages all members of the team to meet on a frequent basis for brief meetings. When it comes to managing offshore development teams, these sessions are ideal for coordinating their efforts.

In reality, for scrum offshore development, remote teams must practice three sorts of meetings.

• Weekly or daily stand-up meetings for 15-20 minutes to get the latest information.
• Sprint planning meetings are used to prepare the sprint goal and backlog for the following sprint.
• Iteration plans for the software produced are created during release planning sessions.

Here are some modes to practice to make your communication successful and interruption-free:

• Slack and Microsoft Teams are two of the most popular business chat applications for instant messaging. Not just the offshore team, but also the in-house team, can be included here.
• When you need to talk about something in-depth, you should use voice calls. Apart from the above-mentioned tools that offer audio/video calls, you can also use WhatsApp.
• Even if you are thousands of miles away from the person making the call, video calls, especially real-time video calls, give you the impression of being present. For team meetings, Google Meet and Zoom are ideal.

To Wrap Up

Agile offshore software development is perfect for the management of your organization. You don’t have to rely on your in-house developers to build apps, and you may take advantage of their experience on major projects. You may conveniently manage your projects by delegating them to an offshore development company.

Apart from the advantages, every offshore company and the hirer may face some hurdles, however, advancement in technology has the solution in overcoming these obstacles. So, make sure your offshore development team is well-versed with technology and never hesitate to open up learning and update themselves.