I met Alan at Agile 2008 in Toronto when we were both volunteers. He’s passionate about most things, definitely passionate about Agile methods and always thought provoking. He’s presenting ‘Tales of oppression: challenging autocratic corporate cultures‘

Alan Cyment loves seeing software development from a human
perspective. He strives for honest, passion-driven,
great-but-not-perfect emergent design. For software for humans, rather
than machines; looking people in the eyes, rather than reading e-mail.
He organized the first open CSM certification in Latin America in
2006, created the largest, most active agile-software related
discussion group in Spanish, and co-organized the first all-agile
Latin American conference, that took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
in October 2008.

Alan is currently the only native Spanish-speaking CST in the world,
and is continually aiming at expanding the frontiers of Scrum,
especially in countries where agility is finding it hard to make its
way forward. He holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from the
Universidad de Buenos Aires, where he spent some time as a full-time
researcher.

Alan also worked as a developer for 8 years in a plethora of business
domains and development languages, until he stumbled upon Smalltalk
and the old paradigm simply fell apart. That was his first, real life,
contact with agility. Working with Smalltalk revealed the magic of
devising the simplest thing that could possibly work. And fate took
him somewhere else, where he had to go back to regular development: it
was .NET this time. There was no way he could possible keep being a
developer. Nothing could compare to Smalltalk. So he became a
full-time ScrumMaster. And then a coach. And then a trainer. And there
he is these days: trying to spread as much as possible the idea that
the answer to “how” is “yes”.

I can’t claim I’m following it closely, but I can’t help but notice the growth of software development and Agile practices in South America.
Indeed. With the increased use of agility in the US and Western Europe, customers have realized that awful communication is the main impediment to productive offshore development. Therefore Latin American countries have become a very sexy alternative to the usual players in Asia. Latin American countries are usually very near from the US and Western Europe in terms of time difference and cultural background, which has helped ignite an incredible growth of outsourcing companies using agile methods in the continent in order to cater for dollar/euro-funded projects.

What unique challenges do you see for software development there?
The pitfalls are common to most offshoring projects. Due to different reasons,
US/European customers usually distrust offshore contractors, especially new ones (and most of Latin American offshoring companies are recent players in the market). They do not state that explicitly, but rather try and compensate for that lack of trust by imposing some “really very ultra uber senior” X (architect, tester, BA, you name it) inside the development team. This person is usually put into place in order to exert some kind of (illusion of?) control over the remote team. Problem is customers don’t realize that there’s no such thing as unidirectional trust. Contractors feel this lack of trust and distrust their clients in return. Lack of trust hinders collaboration. Add to this that most projects that I usually find in this area are small to middle-sized, mostly because of this lack of trust. Projects this small usually have low budgets, which evaporates most possibilities of reducing the communication gap by sending ambassadors, getting all the team together for a couple of sprints and other techniques that partially compensate for the icy communication that team members can have using the different variations of IM. In short, there’s a lot of potential for fairly good offshoring (which will always be cumbersome, to say the least, when compared to co-located development) in Latin America. But in order for customers to make the best use of it, they have to embrace the spirit of agility and not just play by the mere rules they read from a book: a bit more trust, short feedback cycles, considering error as an investment, collaboration, pragmatism balanced with idealism and things could begin to flow a lot more smoothly.

Sometimes we get unique insights from the outside. Do you have any advice for mainstream Agile practice based on your experience and observations?
I’ll do my best: assume that some organizational cultures are simply incompatible with agility, caress and spread the spirit rather than the letter behind agile methods and be humbler when trying to help an organization move to agile methods: if too much oppression is in the air you might end up hurting both individuals and the organization as a whole.

Finally, are there any obstacles to growth and maturity of Agile practice in your country that people from outside might help with?
My take on this is that agile communities in developing countries should learn from their peers in similar communities. There’s a huge corpus out there that we try and make sense of, but I see the usual “hope that some expert who speaks English may visit our region this year” as a huge impediment to building a sustainable community. We have to have our own experts, our own story to tell. We need to change from always being the object to sometimes becoming the subject.