In my spare time I have been reading about Scrum and how to implement it for an offshore development for a while. There are both success stories and failures but I like it because it provides visibility, motivate developers by providing a complete task (business requirements gathering, design decisions, implementation, unit testing) and allows team to quickly react to changes.
As a kick off to it, I sent a Daily Standup Email to my onshore team answering three questions:
What have you done since yesterday?
What are you planning to do today (tomorrow)?
Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal?
That is another good thing about Agile, because you can modify the whole process as you want or as it suits the environment. And, you don’t have to adopt the whole process and just pick those that will increase the productivity, provide visibility and motive developers.
I will continue blogging my experience using Scrum for offshore development and management. Some of the articles/essays that I read are:
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/agileOffshore.html
http://www.scrumalliance.org/pages/scrum_student_resources
Programming and Beyond 