Chapter 22. Offshore Development

Offshore development provides a case study for applying XP’s values, principles, and practices outside their “sweet spot,” the small team sitting together.

I don’t like the political and racial overtones of the word “offshore”: high-paid white people taking advantage of low-paid dark people and then complaining about “them” taking “our” jobs. “Offshore” implies an imbalance of power, the kind of imbalance that can easily derail software development. I use the term “multi-site” here because XP applies similarly to all geographically dispersed teams.

There are lots of reasons to run a project at multiple sites. Salary differential is only one of these reasons. The database people may be in Toronto and the telecom ...

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