Experience of executing fixed price off-shored agile project

• Authors: Udayan Banerjee;Eswaran Narasimhan;N. Kanakalata
• Venue: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
• Year: 2011

Organizations delivering offshore software development services have traditionally focused on CMMI framework to deliver quality software. With agile methodologies gaining more wide spread acceptance, such organizations cannot stay away from them. There are concerns about combining agile methodologies with offshoring. There are also concerns about mismatch of agile methodologies with CMMI framework. In this paper we have looked at the problem from the perspective of an offshore software development organization and recounted our experience in adopting agile methodology in executing fixed price agile project. The challenges we have faced comes from three different dimensions. First is to address the issue of having an agile team split across two different countries. The second is to execute the agile project within the framework prescribed under CMMI. Here the challenge is not only to address the actual gap between CMMI and agile methodologies but also to address the perceived shortcomings of agile methodologies. The third dimension is to execute the project as a fixed price one where the requirement is not frozen at the beginning of the project. We have listed the challenges that we have faced. They can be categorized under requirements management, contract management, team management, distributed working, when to design, role of a specialist, testing challenges and CMMI adherence. The different solutions tried and the levels of success in overcoming them have also been included. Our experience indicates that agile methodologies can coexist with offshoring and CMMI framework.