I recently completely a business trip to India for Serena Software. I visited Chennai and Bangalore. It was an amazing trip and the first opportunity I've had to directly experience the Indian people and their culture.
The purpose of my trip was to visit Serena customers and prospects and to speak with them about Agile development. I had meetings with HCL, Cognizant, and Infosys. These companies graciously hosted me and brought technical and project leaders from their organizations to discuss various aspects and issues with regard to the adoption of agile methods. I was very impressed with where they were. While Agile's initial foothold in India has for the most part been driven by the service company's foreign (mostly US) customer, agile was also being adopted now for its inherent benefits as well. I believe we are about to see an explosive adoption wave in India similar to what we are seeing in the states. Most of what we discussed was "typical" challenges for teams adopting agile. We of course spent a bit of time discussing how to handle globally distributed agile development. The pattern that seems to be most effective, is make sure that the agile team is co-located and clear communication mechanisms are in place.
I had a few meetings with the press. One interview got picked up by SDA India. You can find it here (http://www.sda-india.com/sda_india/psecom,id,23,site_layout,sdaindia,interviews,71,p,0.html).
The open public presentations were a blast. It was overwhelming to see the excitement about agile. Both presentations were oversubscribed and were standing room only. The first was an evening event in Bangalore that was delivered to the Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN). SPIN's mission is "to achieve breakthroughs in quality and productivity" and agile is really resonating in this community. We also did a public seminar. We had capacity for 150. 270+ signed up. And we crammed 170 into ballroom. Pretty amazing.
It will be fascinating to see what will happen with 3 billion more people focused on making agile successful!
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