Offshore software development has never been easy. Neither has DevOps. Although both offer a distinct set of advantages to organizations, trying to do them together could be challenging. In addition to creating a culture of collaboration, new tools have to be adopted. Yet, many large global organizations have successfully built DevOps capabilities across time zones, while meeting requirements 24×7 – within time and budget.

Here’s how Offshore Development has Changed with DevOps:

1. The Improvement in Product Quality: Quality management has always been a basic requirement of software development, and also a popular way to control development costs. But with offshore development, quality management gained a reputation for being rigid and imbalanced. Offshore teams had a tough time balancing quality and costs. The perception grew that they could only focus on one aspect while overlooking the other. However, DevOps brings in a way for offshore development teams to drive quality and costs simultaneously. Since there is more collaboration between teams, bugs are identified quickly – which improves quality, and there is less rework – which reduces the associated costs.
2. The Stress on Culture: Offshore development teams have often focused on the tools and technologies needed to drive outcomes. However, with the advent of DevOps, there is a ton of business culture aspects to consider. When DevOps comes into the picture, it’s not just about tooling; teams have to work together and collaborate to drive the intended DevOps outcomes. Rather than looking at culture as a nice-to-have feature, offshore development teams have started to look at it as a core competency that lays the foundation of an efficient software development practice.
3. Accelerated time-to-Market: Since the dawn of offshore development, teams have been following the sun; once early analysis and design are complete, documentation is sent to remote developers to start coding and testing. However, what DevOps does, is turn all of this on its head; by seeking greater collaboration between teams, it helps them release software in bite-sized sprints – so teams can get more frequent visibility and feedback. Such an approach builds faster feedback loops, accelerates the velocity at which a company can test hypotheses about what the client wants – without wasted time and effort – and brings products to market sooner.
4. The Elimination of Hand-offs: Offshore development has also always been about hand-offs. When one person (or team) is done with a piece of work, a key milestone is achieved, and he/she then notifies the other to start working. However, what DevOps does is just the exact opposite. It enables different teams to work on aspects of software development in tandem, while greatly reducing the number of handoffs or delays. Teams do not have to waste time waiting for a “go-ahead” to start working; instead, they drive continuous collaboration through the entire development life cycle, keep track of tasks across coding, unit testing, build scripts, configuration scripts and avoid passing work back and forth.
5. The Growth of Analytical Dashboards: For offshore teams having a tough time getting visibility into project status, DevOps drives the use of analytical dashboards. These dashboards often serve the purpose of providing a single source of truth across the complete organization, while giving real-time updates on project status, issues, challenges, and improvement opportunities. Teams that leverage these tools find themselves resolving issues faster while making the entire process of offshore development far more effective.
6. Handling out-of-Scope Requests: Offshore teams have always found it difficult to handle out-of-scope requests and cater to emergency patch-up works which come out of their schedule. This is mainly due to the differences in time zone. However, with DevOps, the project’s scope is clearly defined through several iterations of communication between the internal team and the offshore team. Any out-of-scope request can be accommodated, based on the availability of resources, as can urgent jobs which need immediate attention.

Improve Software Development Outcomes: 

When the world embraced the offshore development model, the productivity gains and cost savings stimulated technological innovation for years to come. While offshoring helped businesses achieve their market and customer goals – quickly and more efficiently, it also paved the way for the adoption of methodologies and approaches to produce software more efficiently and effectively.

DevOps is one such transformation, that is helping offshore teams break departmental siloes, and drive a cultural shift towards efficient software delivery. The changes range from dramatically improving software quality to accelerating time-to-market, eliminating wasteful hand-offs, to offering real-time visibility into product status while seamlessly handling out-of-scope requests. The impact of DevOps on offshoring has been phenomenal, and the approach will continue to boost offshore development outcomes for years to come.