Context: Agile methods in offshored projects have become increasingly popular. Yet, many companies have found that the use of agile methods in coordination with companies located outside the regions of early agile adopters remains challenging. India has received particular attention as the leading destination of offshoring contracts due to significant cultural differences between sides of such contracts. Alarming differences are primarily rooted in the hierarchical business culture of Indian organizations and related command-and-control management behavior styles.

Objective: In this study, we attempt to understand whether cultural barriers persist in distributed projects in which Indian engineers work with a more empowering Swedish management, and if so, how to overcome them. The present work is an invited extension of a conference paper.

Method: We performed a multiple-case study in a mature agile company located in Sweden and a more hierarchical Indian vendor. We collected data from five group interviews with a total of 34 participants and five workshops with 96 participants in five distributed DevOps teams, including 36 Indian members, whose preferred behavior in different situations we surveyed.

Results: We identified twelve cultural barriers, six of which were classified as impediments to agile software development practices, and report on the manifestation of these barriers in five DevOps teams. Finally, we put forward recommendations to overcome the identified barriers and emphasize the importance of cultural training, especially when onboarding new team members.

Conclusions: Our findings confirm previously reported behaviors rooted in cultural differences that impede the adoption of agile approaches in offshore collaborations, and identify new barriers not previously reported. In contrast to the existing opinion that cultural characteristics are rigid and unchanging, we found that some barriers present at the beginning of the studied collaboration disappeared over time. Many offshore members reported behaving similarly to their onshore colleagues.

背景：离岸项目中的敏捷方法越来越受欢迎。然而，许多公司发现，与位于早期敏捷采用者地区之外的公司协调使用敏捷方法仍然具有挑战性。由于离岸合同双方之间存在显着的文化差异，印度作为离岸合同的主要目的地受到了特别关注。令人震惊的差异主要源于印度组织的分层业务文化以及相关的命令和控制管理行为样式。

目标：在这项研究中，我们试图了解文化障碍是否在印度工程师与更有权力的瑞典管理层合作的分布式项目中持续存在，如果是，如何克服这些障碍。目前的工作是会议论文的受邀扩展。

方法：我们在一家位于瑞典的成熟敏捷公司和一家等级更高的印度供应商中进行了多案例研究。我们从五个小组访谈中收集了数据，总共有 34 名参与者和五个研讨会，在五个分布式 DevOps 团队中有 96 名参与者，其中包括 36 名印度成员，我们调查了他们在不同情况下的首选行为。

结果：我们确定了十二个文化障碍，其中六个被归类为敏捷软件开发实践的障碍，并报告了这些障碍在五个 DevOps 团队中的表现。最后，我们提出了克服已识别障碍的建议，并强调文化培训的重要性，尤其是在新团队成员入职时。

结论：我们的研究结果证实了先前报道的植根于文化差异的行为，这些行为阻碍了在离岸合作中采用敏捷方法，并确定了先前未报道的新障碍。与现有的认为文化特征是僵化和不变的观点相反，我们发现在研究合作开始时存在的一些障碍随着时间的推移消失了。许多离岸成员报告其行为与其在岸同事相似。