I just returned from visiting our offshore development team in India. On the plane back I was thinking about why some offshore development projects fail. It's well-known in the software industry that many offshore development projects fail, even though there is still a great deal of debate on how often failures occur. At Shiny Creek we have been using offshore development for years, and before that I was personally part of several offshore development efforts at other companies - with mixed results. I also know personally of several high-profile efforts that were deemed to be failures: projects that were late, over-budget, did not deliver the right functionality, and any combination of these results.
What leads to these failures?
1. Bad development process. By far the biggest cause of offshore development failures is also the cause of many on-shore or in-house development failures: not having an effective development process. The development process should govern...