Using Scrum in offshore software projects

Due to its growth at exponential rate offshore software development has become a common way of producing software by software organizations from highly industrialized countries in Europe and North America. Previous studies have revealed that some of these organizations use agile project management frameworks in managing and running their offshore software projects. Blending agile principles and offshore software development appears to raise a contradiction as the two notions have opposite characteristics. This research focuses the implementation of agile project management frameworks such as Scrum in offshore software projects. The research project was performed by reviewing relevant literature and analyzing the results obtained from the interviews conducted to Cambio Healthcare Systems AB, a Swedish software company that offshore its software projects with Creative Technologies Pty Ltd located in Sri Lanka. The interviews were conducted to Swedish based staff involved in offshore software projects with their Sri Lankan partners. The research findings indicate that offshore software development is a challenging business and requires close monitoring to minimize its challenges. Some of the challenges include dispersion, loss of communication richness and cultural differences between the parties involved. Moreover even though the agile project management frameworks and offshore software development principles differ in nature, the findings have revealed that software organizations such as Cambio make use of these differences to minimize the challenges they face in their respective offshore software projects. The main conclusions drawn from this research is that there is not much evidence that the application of agile project management frameworks such as Scrum is feasible enough to combat the challenges. This research suggests for further research studies to collect information from staff in both offshore and onshore sites in order to formulate enough evidence on whether to apply these strategies or not. Självständigt arbete på grundnivå (kandidatexamen) 15 poäng / 22,5 hp Alan Turing, Building E, 1st floor (3rd floor) Linköping University, Linköping Självständigt arbete på grundnivå (kandidatexamen) 15 poäng / 22,5 hp Due to its growth at exponential rate offshore software development has become a common way of producing software by software organizations from highly industrialized countries in Europe and North America. Previous studies have revealed that