What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]
Monday March 22, 2004
Offshore Agility Two software industry trends, offshore development and agile methodologies, seem to be squarely at odds with each other. This has increasingly been a concern for me because I want to work where functional and unit testing, refactoring and short iterations are core development practices. But as I've been thinking about this, I've come to conclude that offshore and agile might work together just fine.
Martin Fowler recently wrote an article about this. In discussing the use of offshore programmers with his company, one of the things he mentions is using Cruise Control to aid continuous integration of multiply located collaborators. This sounds good. I've seen lots of problems with Cruise Control grinding down with OutOfMemory errors but I'm more suspicious of running in-container tests like Cactus than I am of Cruise Control per se.
An article I read in the paper the other week mentioned that the help-line calls for the welfare and food stamp programs in California are routed to offshore call centers in Mexico (for Spanish speakers) and India (for English speakers). What would be grimly humorous is if the State of California's Employment Development Department started offshoring its labor.
( Mar 22 2004, 09:35:16 PM PST )
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