Agile development practice has gained popularity in the last few years. India has so far been riding on CMMI bandwagon, with companies vying with each other to get CMMI certification. Recently, we are seeing more and more projects being executed using agile methodologies. This has also brought with it, some challenges. Not all of them are unique to agile, but they tend to manifest earlier and has higher impact in agile. While there are different types of challenges, here, we are focusing on the Indian cultural ones. Also, we are looking at the challenges in a joint product development – where work is done both by offshore team (which is typically the outsourced organization) and the onsite team (the client team). After we elaborate on the challenges, we present how we have tried to solve them in our current client engagement.

1. Cultural Challenges in Global
Agile
Agile India Conference 2010
Raghuram Bharathan

3. BACKGROUND

5. Playground
• Co-development
– Different time zones
– Different teams
• 2 week iterations
• Separate QA team
• Remote Product Owner
• QA inline with iteration
• Common toolset

6. Rules of the game
• Meetings
– Pre-planning and Planning
– Demo and Retro
– Standups
– Conference calls
• Work
– User stories
– Bugs from released stories

8. Players
• Customer team
– Average 10+ years experience
– Similar experience levels
• Offshore team
– Different experience levels - 0 to 10
– Different cultural backgrounds
– Most with no agile experience

9. THE CHALLENGES

10. Why IT industry?

11. Why IT industry?
• High-paying
• Opportunities
• Overseas exposure
• Glamorous
• Air-conditioned work, 5 day week

12. Education System
• Theoretical focus
– Civics and civic sense
– Learn about road rules
but not follow
– System of Government
– Less importance to
games and sports
• How many of us can fix
a leaking tap, build a
book shelf

13. Programming
• Focus on quantity – number of languages
• Learn through a set of programs
– Sort a list of numbers
– Binary search
– Matrix multiplication
– Doubly linked list

14. Data Structure
Complexity

15. Programming
• Less focus on design and implementation
– Performance, scalability and reliability
– Testability
– Coding standards
– Best practices of programming

16. How it affects
• Doing it right the first time
• Test First/ Test Driven Development
• Writing clean code (free of violations)

18. IT/Service Mindset
• Somehow solve a problem
• Means are not important or relevant
• Deadline driven
• Quantity rather than quality
• Applicable for only one situation

19. Contrasting Product Mindset
• Hardware, OS, browser independence
• Design for change
• Logging
• Installation and deployment strategy
• Upgrade strategy
• Service packs and hotfixes

20. How it affects
• Designing for change
• Thinking beyond specific problem
• Looking at the bigger picture

21. Distractions at work
• Flexible working hours
• Getting to office – traffic jams
• Breakfast and coffee breaks
• Phone calls
• Personal mails and social network
• Friends at work
• Hobbies and recreations – lack of

22. How it affects
• Sticking to estimated time
• Working to compensate for lost time
• Dependant team members and delays
• Dependant groups – QA, schedule

23. Hierarchy
• Parents at home
– School
– College
– Job
– Marriage
• Teachers at school/college
• Supervisors at work
– Tell me what to do and by when

24. How it affects
• Commitment
• Estimation
• Ownership
• Proactiveness

25. Resume fattening
• Number of different technologies
• Number of projects
• Jack of all arts
– Master of none?
• Superficial/Shallow knowledge
• Disinterest in specialization

26. How it affects
• Working in a time-boxed environment
– Sticking to estimates
– Overcoming technical challenges
– Writing optimized code
– Using appropriate library features

27. Reporting Impediments
• Cultural influence
– left hand stigma
– fear of punishment
• Self-conscious
• Linking to appraisal
• Non-technical
Manager

28. Retrospective participation
• Cultural influence • Why raise the barrier?
– Stoic and self-content
– Why upset the apple- • Skirt around sensitive
cart? topics
• Set a goal – meet or – People, ability,
exceed aptitude

29. Collaboration
• Talking vs discussion
• Divide and conquer vs
independence
• Me, mine, myself vs us, ours
• Blame game
• Taking feedbacks personally

30. Communication
• Cultural influence
– English as foreign language
– Mother tongue influence
• Trouble with accent
• What I said and what I
mean
• Verbal and written

32. Holidays
• Cultural influence
– Away from family
– Going home for festivals
• Multitude of festivals
• Regional and religious
• 2 week iterations and holidays

33. Unlearning
• Happy with status quo
– resistance to change
• Unaware of doing
mistakes
• Difficulty in correcting
• Importance of learning
it right the first time

34. Tools of trade

35. Prayer Programming

36. Pat on the back

37. OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

38. Self-driven teams
• Who should bell the cat?
• Why me?
• What is in it for me?
• Harder I work, the more
work I get
• Peer pressure

39. Chief Programmer model
• Create specializations amongst team members
• Break stories into tasks
– Specialized team member picks tasks
• Less self-driven and more ability-driven
• Leads as Chief Programmers
– interact with customer
– coach and mentor team

41. Tool-driven approach
• Minimize the human factor
• Tools
– to flag style violations
– to identify lack of code coverage
– to flag incorrect coding practices
– to run for each check-in and identify issues at the
earliest
– consistent across local and remote teams

43. Overcoming distractions
• Core business hours
• Blocking of social networking at work
• Co-location – low cubicle walls
• Manager co-located with team

45. Tracking
• Variant of Pomodoro technique – pre-lunch
and post-lunch (3 hour slots)
• Stand ups before start of work and post-lunch
• Individual follow-ups and reminders
• Proxy updates

47. Communication Channels
• Multiple channels
– Wiki, Issue tracking system, email, instant
messaging
– Regular teleconferences
– Large whiteboard with visible status

48. Pigs and Chickens
• Be transparent
• Track through tools
• Try to help
• Shield from
distraction

49. * of the iteration

50. Summary
• Agile is here to stay
• Brings issues to surface rapidly
• Focuses on continuous improvement
• Need to work hard to stay afloat
• Survival of the fittest

51. Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam
http://maruhgar.blogspot.com
raghuram.bharathan@yahoo.com