[couchand]

I've never worked with a team in India, but I do have experience with outsourcing to eastern Europe. I don't doubt the other comments that say it can be done, but in my experience it's tough.

The development cycle goes roughly like this: - Early morning call to discuss requirements - E-mails over the course of the morning covering parts of the same requirements - Next morning call to discuss the same requirements (seems like we've got it this time) - Code review uncovers missing requirements...

Between the time difference, the multiple hand-offs and the communication problems we would spend an order of magnitude more time on a task than it would take an in-house resource.

I don't think it's completely impossible to get the formula right, but you need to be explicit about everything, which doesn't really work in an agile development cycle made of tight feedback loops. However, if you're operating a more waterfall process and are able to code up a suite of acceptance tests, it could be workable.

[EdwardDiego]

> but you need to be explicit about everything, which doesn't really work in an agile development cycle made of tight feedback loops.

We're a scrum team based in Oceania working for a German firm, and we have had similar issues which we've resolved by usage of proxy product owners and regular backlog groomings.

It'd doable, but it takes some investment in relationships and knowledge.