Transparency

This builds on an earlier post about 5 things to look for in a Successful Outsourcing Relationship. One of the five most important factors that dictates the success of your outsourced product development is transparency. Its not an abstract concept, let me explain precisely what it means.

First, a few basics about an "agile" project. Cutting through the fluff, here's what it involves (a great resource to better understand what it takes to have a great dev process is from joelonsoftware) :

1. On a weekly basis, the team (including you) agree on what to shoot for - features and functionality
2. The project lead then breaks this up into tasks -- each task generally not exceeding 8 hours of work - so for a 4 person team, you're looking at about 20 tasks
3. The developers create a spec for each task - not formal, but enough to explain what their approach is
4. They write code
5. There is a daily build setup to run around noon each day, including unit tests
6. There is a smoke test done by the test team for the build (should take no more than 30 mts)
7. There is a deliverable at the end of the week that goes through more rigorous testing

Transparency means:

1. At any time, you should be able to access the code base, see the checkins from each developer (there are plenty of near-free online repositories, we use unfuddle and love it).
2. The project lead should share the task list for the next week with you at the end of every week.
3. You should have access to the spec written by developers for each task - demand that it be done and made available to you.
4. You should have the daily build url. If you're located on the opposite side of the world from your team, thats wonderful - their smoke test issues and broken builds should be fixed at the end of their day, and beginning of yours.
5. You should have access to the bug list - and see that bugs are going through a clean process

This sounds like a lot, but once its setup in a company, its a piece of cake. Demand it.