The Challenges of Offshore Agile Software Development in Sri Lanka and Effects on the Project Outcome

Abstract

Agile development methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming are being used by a number of software companies around the world. The offshore software industry in Sri Lanka has also started to adapt these development methods in order to meet the growing demand. However applying agile development methods in an offshore model has its own challenges and each of these challenges has an effect on the outcome of the project. Currently there has been no research done in Sri Lanka as to how each of these challenges effects the project outcome and this formed the main research question. The focus of this reassure was to study how each of these challenges effect the project outcome in terms of time, cost, scope, quality, and the overall project. The first objective was to study and contrast agile development methods with traditional waterfall based development. The second objective was to carry out a literature survey and identify the main challenges that offshore software development companies face when applying agile development methods. The five main challenges identified were, communication, achieving team coherence, following the agile development method, limitations on tools and infrastructure, and testing. The third research objective was to study how these challenges affect the project outcome. The challenges identified in the literature review were used to prepare questionnaires for three companies in Sri Lanka that practice agile development methods in an offshore model. The objective of the questionnaire was to find out how the presence of these challenges effect the project outcome and how overcoming these challenges affect the project outcome. The data gathered from the questionnaires were analyzed using Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient. The results identified that communication, tools and infrastructure, following the Agile development method, and testing had a strong relationship with the project outcome in terms of time, cost, scope, quality, and the overall project outcome. Team coherence had a moderate relationship with the time, cost, scope, quality, and the overall project outcome. Based on the results, a research framework was derived which answered the research question of; how each of the challenges affect the project outcome. Finally, the concluded that all the challenges identified for this research apart from team coherence had a strong effect on the project outcome. Team coherence had a moderate effect on the project outcome.