Nari Kanan from SourcingMag talks about the lack of iteration in offshore IT work:

However, (offshore) software development has institutionalized non-iterative ways of doing things. You CAN come up with a definitive requirements document that CAN be turned into a definitive design document that CAN be turned into perfect code, which in turn makes users ecstatic! Couldn’t be further from the truth.

Definitely. But how do you organize a successful, iterative process with an offshore team? Time & geography are the obvious challenges. But, the problem goes much deeper than that. It is about mindset. And, although your business development guy won’t admit it, his offshore team doesn’t have it.

Most offshore developers have never really been included in a brainstorming session or a scoping process - their job is about one thing: take requirements and churn out code. Now, we need them to learn to iterate. They haven’t even spent time scoping!

Successful iteration isn’t about reworking your code 14 times a month. When most offshore firms talk about iteration, what they really mean is that their project managers are going to rewrite requirements over and over again, guiding their developers through a series of protracted, stressful waterfall processes until everyone loses their mind.

14 waterfalls don’t make a river. They just make a lot of noise.

When we first started embracing iterative development 4 years ago, it just meant that we didn’t sleep. We would work with the client during the day, stay up with our team to communicate scope at night, and then get up early to synch everyone up and ‘iterate’ in the morning. Think that’s scalable? Ask my wife.

No, true iteration requires a reworking of the entire offshoring process. More on this soon.

I’ve submitted a proposal to ChangeThis (a site founded by the amazing Seth Godin) to write a manifesto on my ideas for improvement in IT outsourcing - would appreciate your vote!

One of the more entertaining aspects of my nightly ritual is my Indian team’s use of English. Of course, after 5 years of phone and IM conversations, I am pretty comfortable with some of their more loosely translated phrases, to the point that I sometimes find myself asking my wife to “kindly do the needful.”

Depending on the context, she can find this funny (usually…ummm, nope).

Manish Vij posts an extensive list of these bastardized English phrases, which he calls Bombayisms. Here are a few of the ones I’m familiar with (okay, I’ve never heard anyone use “rape for a year”)

beat yourself (beat yourself up)
issues (children)
kindly (please)
land up (arrive)
passed out (graduated)
rape for a year (to date, promise to marry and dump)
bang behind (directly behind)
blow (blow up)
cent per cent (a hundred percent)
ironical (ironic)
do the needful (do what’s needed)
see the full list