Agile Software Development

This is part 3 of a series of posts about using agile methodologies in distributed development scenarios.

One of our readers (Deven) posted a comment emphasizing the importance of a well organized collaboration system when doing distributed agile development. In his list of essentials, he mentions the need for a "Central Globally Available Source Control System". He is correct and so in this post I will talk about the various tools and techniques that can be used to manage a central source control repository.

This is part 2 of an indefinite series of posts centered on using agile techniques in distributed development scenarios. (See also Part 1 on Reinterpreting th Manifesto)

At work, most of our projects have daily Scrums. For some of our projects this simple activity becomes much more laborious because part of the team is in a different time zone. In this post I will write about some key guidelines that we follow to make sure that Scrums remain productive and interesting. Without further ado, here we go:

I work for a software company which has their development center in India. A large portion of the work that we take on has to do with product co-development. These clients are typically ISVs who have active product development teams. They usually partner with us to augment their team sizes to take advantage of the extended daily development cycle. So, for a client who is in the US, for example, our team here takes over from the US team when they come into the office and then hand over to the US team when they leave; this allows almost round-the-clock development.

In such a scenario, where two separate teams are working in close coordination with each other, the right kind interpersonal relationship within team members can really boost productivity and efficiency. So, how do you get a proper relationship going?

This is Part 1 of an indefinite series of posts centered on the topic of distributed development and using agile methodologies in distributed teams.

Problem
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” The manifesto was put together in 2001; a long time ago by software industry standard. At that time, offshore development (the primary scenario for distributed development) was beginning to gather momentum, but most such development occurred using the traditional heavy-weight development methodologies.