Effective Distributed Agile 4 Real
From AgileOpenNorthwest
When Carlos Sirias and I arrive to Seattle for the AONW conference we decided that we wanted to share with the group our experience with Agile in distributed teams. It is always a challenge to be Agile when your team is not always in the same office, country or to make it worst the same time zone.
We divided the discussion into 3 main topics.Pain points, where we failed and what works.
These are the notes we took from the discussion
Pain points
- Problems with cultural differences
- Geographical location
- Sense of ownership of the project
- Work ethics on the group
Where we failed
- There is not a set of common tools to work on the projects and that often causes problems with the development process
- Lack of an effective communication channel, often times is hard to validate the understanding of the messages coming from the team
What work
- Get the team together as many times as possible
- Validate that everyone is understanding the messages to guarantee the code built is what the customer wants
- Standardize the use of tools for the development process (Continuous integration, source code, bug tracking, etc)
- Be sensitive of everyone’s cultural and work realities
- Use of web cams to be able to understand facial expressions
By the end of the discussion we ask everyone to name the one thing that is required in order to succeed in a distributed agile team and the conclusion was that TRUST is an imperative in order to have a sucessful agile distributed team
