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Secret sauce of offshoring and distribution - summary of Scan-Agile open space session

October 31, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

This Wednesday on the first Scandinavian Agile conference in Helsinki I was running an open space session about what works and what doesn't work with distributed and/or outsourcing teams. During the two hours we had an excellent discussion with many people in various roles from offshore customers to ones working in an outsourcing company to people being pushed to distribute, from product managers to Scrum Masters to developers.

A lot of the discussion results are intangible and stay in the heads of the participants and I didn't record the excellent discussion on feature teams VS component teams VS functional teams in the case of distribution. Here is the brief summary of what was commonly acknowledged to be working and not working in cases of offshoring and distribution. Use at your own risk.

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How to Survive Multi-Continent Daily Scrums

August 20, 2008 by Peter Stevens

As Scrum, XP and Agile mature, Teams and ScrumMasters are increasingly confronted with the problem of handling multiple distributed teams, telecommuters or nomadic team members who aren't able to just co-locate. For instance, a recent project for the Dutch Railways[1] involved 3 teams with a total of 15 developers and testers from Holland and India. This constellation presents many special challenges in addressing impediments, assuring communication and collaboration despite language and time zone differences, and picking tools and technology.... Given these challenges, how does a distributed team perform the Daily Scrum?

Each project is different and has its own special needs and requirements. Is there a common language? If not, then how can communication over the language barrier be assured? Are there multiple teams at multiple locations or one team with scattered members? Project management is about the art of the possible, so how the Team(s) should organize itself/themselves will depend on their actual situation.

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Distributed Agile Development - 3: Central Source Control System

October 8, 2007 by Vaibhav

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.

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Distributed Agile Development - 2: Managing daily Scrums.

October 5, 2007 by Vaibhav

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:

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Agile in a global development scenario

October 4, 2007 by devenkalra

When I started to develop software for my new company (Infodoro), I started to work with a distributed team in eastern Europe and India and the daily scrum was not as practical. During that time, I realized that Agile is a lot more than the daily scrum. And it is quite practical and effective to do Agile development in the true sense.

Read the rest at my blog .

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Distributed Development: How important is face-to-face interaction?

October 4, 2007 by Vaibhav

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?

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Distributed Agile Development - 1: Reinterpreting the manifesto.

September 28, 2007 by Vaibhav

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.

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