If the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication?
When serendipity taps you on the shoulder I've found it best not to ignore the intrusion. I recently got back from an intense trip to India, speaking at several seminars and to a number of our leading customers. On my return I picked up "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and this book provided me with a deeper perspective on what I had just learned, face-to-face, with the same groups of people I had just met in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. And here we are in the second edition of Agile Journal talking about Offshore Agile Development.
There are clearly Changing Times in India right now: the several offshoring companies I spoke to, including HCL, R-Systems and Wipro, all told me that they are transitioning from a "work to hire" paradigm to a consulting one. In the past, they were given a technology solution to implement. They are now being given technology problems to solve. This is causing a dramatic shift in the way in which these companies develop applications.
In the past, when these companies were asked to develop an application for their customers, they would take on the persona and the technology infrastructure
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of the commissioning company. They would organize their personnel in the same manner as the corporation that was employing them, even, in some cases, providing separate entrances to the technology campus labeled with the customer's name. The development tools used by these offshore developers were the exact same set of tools in the exact same configuration as those used by their counterparts onshore.
And here is the problem. Many of the companies that were exploiting the benefits of the offshore community had poorly implemented and incomplete technology infrastructures, often comprising legacy tooling. When the tooling is poor, this significantly exacerbates the complexity of dealing with development across 9,000 miles and 10 and one half time zones. One of the great advantages of offshoring is the 20 hour development day with developers in India ending their day just as developers on the U.S. East Coast are starting theirs. Coordination and collaboration in this context is the key factor in ensuring that projects are successful.
Over the past 15 years the offshoring industry in India has seen the best and the worst stacks of technologies used in support of the application development lifecycle. It has gained considerable expertise in determining how to work effectively in those conditions. Consequently firms in this industry are now in a powerful position to recommend what the optimal development stack should look like. When given the latitude, and this is happening increasingly, the offshoring companies are putting together their preferred stacks of tools to meet the customer's technology problem to be solved. It should be noted that this is not always the same stack every time. These companies recognize that there are times when one vendors' tool for, say, requirements management is better than another vendor's and they will and can swap out these tools as they see fit.
The two critical technologies that are enabling this next phase in the evolution of the offshore development industry are collaboration technologies and interoperability technologies.
Collaboration technologies are essential as, most often, communication between the onshore and offshore team members is through email. Despite India's national prowess at English (I heard the boast fully six times in my week long visit that "India is the world's largest English speaking country") there are still difficulties with interpretation and achieving shared meaning and shared understanding is often very difficult. Indeed codifying information through collaboration tools not only improves clarity but dramatically increases accountability and traceability. This kind of technology is critical at project milestones where project managers, onshore and offshore, can use these tools to obtain fully informed analysis of the project state on both sides of the oceans.
It is often said that selling tools in India is difficult because, as labor is so inexpensive, so well trained and so plentiful, many problems can be solved more cheaply by throwing resources at it rather than by finding and implementing a technology solution. Y2K was a good example of this: despite the ready availability of code scanning and remediation tools, many companies choose to use brute force offshore resources to analyze and remedy their code inventory. The one problem that is not improved by adding more people is communication and collaboration. Yet another reason why these technologies are seen as critical for success in offshore development.
Of course India's other IT claim to fame is that three of every four CMM Level 5 certified companies world wide are Indian. This means that most Indian development teams are operating at a highly optimized level, with strong disciplines and proven processes. This may not be the case for their onshore counterparts. In the same way as having mismatched gearing this causes friction and damage on both sides, having mismatched development methods and cultures impairs effective cross-planet development. Now that India is becoming the driving force in development projects these collaboration tools are being used to bind the onshore partner to the best practices and methodologies being used by the offshore developer.
The introduction of collaboration tools from the offshore vendor to the onshore company is turning on its head the idea of the offshore vendor using the tool set as defined by the customer. Consequently, both in India and in the so-called "developed world" we are facing a renewed integration problem.
As I discussed last month, it is critical that our tools can all be made to interoperate together. This is even truer in the offshoring paradigm. The offshorer wants to combine best-in-class tooling to meet the specific needs of the customer task -- and also provide those tools back to the customer. But doing so essentially introduces alien tools to the customer and forces the customer to integrate those tools into the existing infrastructure. Again we meet the need for an available interoperability platform to make this easy. A plug-play infrastructure for software development tools is critical to achieve high quality collaboration and project success for offshore projects. When I discussed the idea of the common interoperability framework project called ALF (The Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework Project at www.eclipse.org/alf) with the people I met in India many of them were already well aware of the project and everyone I met was very interested in it.
Anything which lowers barriers and simplifies adoption of technology in support of project effectiveness is quickly embraced in India. Open source is viewed entirely on a par with vended solutions. Whatever technology the customer uses, whatever technology will be most effective, whatever technology has been proven before, and whatever technology can be developed in time are all attitudes that are part of the agile culture of development in India.
The logical world really is flat, however the physical world is still burdened with 33 (yes, really 33) time zones and up to 12,451 miles of geography. While it may seem that our development colleague is just in the next cubical, he is actually working the night shift and has a different standard of communication skill and is developing according to some very advanced methodologies. Collaboration technology which is deeply integrated and interoperable is what stops us from being stretched to the limit.
About the Author
With 25 years of industry perspective Kevin has been framing and shaping technology direction both in the US and his native UK. He is currently Vice President, Market Development and Evangelist at Serena Software. He is a sought after speaker and spoke at 50 conferences last year in 11 countries. Kevin mailed this month's article from 68 miles west of St. Lucia.
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If the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication? 
