Agile Offshore Software Development Company

The Agile approach involves a set of practices that ensure rapid delivery of small increments per iteration and promote regular communication between you and the development team. Offshore developers work in 2-4 week sprints and coordinate tasks with a Project Owner (PO). In this role, a specialist acts as a representative of your interests in a development team. A PO collects feedback from stakeholders and prioritizes tasks based on that input.

It is quite challenging to rely on Agile methods when working with an offshore software development team. Nevertheless, it is not so if all the parties deeply understand the principles of this methodology and follow them in their work.
When you want to work with an offshore development team, you must establish close cooperation with your developers from the beginning, set clear goals, and choose comfortable tools for communication and its periodicity. It is important to stay flexible and open to discussing all the details of your project.

A Waterfall approach to development is a sequential process that goes through its stages step-by-step:

• Requirements gathering
• Specification
• Wireframing
• Project estimation
• Development
• Testing and QA
• Release.

With Agile, development teams work against short operations cycles that are repeated repeatedly. During that time, the team focuses on releasing a stable product version rather than documentation. As such, Agile projects can release new features rapidly and more frequently than Waterfall projects.

Agile is an umbrella term representing an iterative approach to the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Unlike traditional software development methodologies, Agile promotes concurrent development and testing activities that produce early results. It prioritizes face-to-face communication and enables the accessible introduction of change.
Scrum, conversely, is one of the many Agile implementation methods. It is a specific framework of the Agile methodology, which helps to deliver incremental builds every two to three sprints.

In Agile methodology, the development lifecycle usually includes the following stages:

• Concept. This stage is devoted to identifying the project goals and prioritizing general tasks. 
• Inception. It’s time to define the team’s composition and prepare, set, and discuss the initial requirements.
• Iteration/construction. Each iteration includes the development of some part of software functionality. The key goal of each of them is to deliver a working feature (or its part). The team is focused on building the software in full accordance with the defined requirements and the feedback that a customer provides on a regular basis. 
• Release. When the team has already built a working product, it is required to test it, prepare tech documentation, and deploy it.
• Production. This stage includes ongoing support and maintenance of the software product.
• Retirement. When the software cannot meet the ongoing business requirements and its support is not feasible anymore, it is necessary to stop using it and end its existence or modernize (migrate) it.

An iterative approach to the development process organization presupposes breaking down large tasks into smaller parts. They can be repeated, analyzed, and refined during the development cycle.
In Agile methodology, an iteration can be explained as a fixed period allocated for developing a feature or fulfilling a particular task. Usually, an Agile development iteration lasts for 1-2 weeks. Nevertheless, in some cases, it is possible to make iterations longer (up to 4 weeks). As a rule, there are formal meetings at the beginning and end of each iteration that allow the team and the Product Owner to discuss the goals and tasks, as well as the progress and the achieved results.

Today, there are different types of Agile development methods, such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean Development, Crystal, Extreme Programming (XP), Feature-driven development (FDD), Nexus, and others. They all have a lot in common but also many peculiarities that make them more appropriate for different projects.
For example, the most popular option is Scrum, which presupposes the realization of a series of sprints and includes everyday 15-minute meetings that help teams to synchronize all the activities. Kanban suggests organizing the development process following a Kanban board table. This table has a column for each flow of the development cycle and a card for each task. Extreme Programming is based on finding “the simplest thing that will work.” It means that, in this case, developers do not concentrate a lot on the long-term product view.

Geomotiv is a trusted Agile offshore software development company with proven expertise. We’ve been providing offshore software development services using the Agile methodology for 13+ years. All our developers and other IT specialists can easily and quickly integrate into your company’s Agile processes and get started with the delivery process. We provide various staffing services such as IT staff augmentation and a dedicated team or can take care of the entire project as a project-based offshore partner.

With the Agile approach, preparing a detailed budget estimation is challenging before the project starts. And that is a normal phenomenon when you must respond to change and incorporate new features without wasting time.
Here’s how you set and control the budget in the Agile flow, in brief. You set an approximate project duration and allocate the resources accordingly. Depending on the number of team members and their roles, you can estimate how much you can accomplish within the given timeline. To learn more, read our recent blog post on this topic.

Our software development teams are well-versed in multiple Agile methodologies and have proven experience adhering to their best practices. Although we easily navigate a vast scope of Agile methodologies, it is Scrum and Kanban that we are most proficient at.
While Scrum is concerned with an iterative work method, Kanban focuses on flow management and visualization. Each framework has its distinctive features, yet they embrace the same ideals and are often used in tandem. Our developers know how to use Scrum and Kanban together and adopt other Agile methodologies defined by your project.

The Agile methodology emphasizes the importance of regular face-to-face interactions during the software development process. However, this is only sometimes feasible in a remote environment where team members may never meet in person.
Having operated offshore development teams for 13+ years, Geomotiv has adapted the Agile methodology to remote-first workflows. We know how to establish efficient collaboration using online tools and prioritize transparency in every action. For instance, all our developers are used to time-boxed daily stand-ups and retrospective meetings.