Just to give a context, there is an offshore team in India for a client in San Francisco. The offshore team is about 9 developers and 4 QA, with one project manager. I am doing onsite coordination for this team from the client location. Every sprint (2 weeks iteration) I go after the stories beforehand, understand it and give an overview during their story time. I also clarify the corner cases for them making sure every piece of requirement is clear and the scope is also well defined. Inspite of this, there are instances of surprises that come-up in the requirement as well as scope (my bad, agreed!). We have started sending mock-ups for every UI story too. But instead the team there does not put any effort to brainstorm and understand the requirement upfront, but they start doing right away without proper understanding.
At the end of sprint (1/2 days before) they ask same questions that were clarified through the mock-up and those which were clarified during story time and the subsequent mails. Finally if I say yes this is to be done etc., they say this was not clarified before. (How do I know this question will pop-up to them?)
They obviously fail to deliver sprint after sprint. The manager there does not even understand a piece of development he being a QA and has zero control of the project (unfortunately promoted as a manager of the same team, when he had tried to resign - which often happens in Indian services company). And this manager not even tries to understand that the dev or QA did not do adequate planning, brainstorming nor do their extra or little effort to understand a feature and its consequences, and directly jumps to the conclusion that the requirements are not clear. Manager also does not spend adequate time with the team and he spends time elsewhere going out! (weird, hearsay!)
There is also a severe dearth of technical and product knowledge of dev and QA respectively, and no steps are being made to improve this. In the first week I hear that they are all clear, the second week things change drastically - my guess is that is when they start to work. Every sprint it becomes worse and only harsh comments and emails are being exchanged. 'Requirements not clear' seem to be the easy way out, and Team there got habituated to saying this to compensate their incapability.
I am unable to explain this as they form a group in making this easy decision, and bounce with multiple rude emails. What would you do to get these things right? How much of adequate is adequate clarity in requirement? I am really unsure of this. (The teams in SFO are rather pretty clear with the even lesser amount of explanation of requirement.) How can I set this right? Is my guess about the offshore team right? (Excuse me for being too verbose!)