Distributed Agile · 20 May, 09:00 PM

Peter Provost recently posted on distributed agile, which is something that I have some firsthand experience with. Actually, VRBO is the first company I’ve worked for that takes agile and Scrum with any degree of seriousness. All of his points are really good and definitely have been issues that we’ve had to deal with. Here’s my own list of points, some covering the same ground as Peter’s:

  1. Chat software is critical. We’ve tried IRC but most of the team disliked it and the idea never really took off. Yahoo! messenger can do group chats, but it’s terrible for that purpose. For some reason, people at work have gravitated to Skype for chat, which works OK. The main thing is having something everyone will agree to use, and not having to
  2. We’ve used Mikogo for desktop sharing and that worked OK (especially considering that it’s free) but starts to flake out around 8 users or so, which made it problematic for doing demo on our sprint planning days. We’ve used WebEx but that had its own problems, lately we’ve been using the Adobe sharing software and that seems to work better.
  3. Doing meetings remotely is a bear. Yesterday was our sprint planning meeting and we did it as a conference call, and from my perspective, it was brutal. It’s nearly impossible to stay focused when the conversation is over the phone. OTOH, when we’re meeting in person, our DBA is still in another state and definitely gets left out of the conversation a lot.
  1. During sprint planning, if you’re doing it remotely, you need to maintain tight control of a conversation to keep it from ranging too far afield and also make sure someone’s taking notes. We’ve had problems with great discussions taking place and then being lost when the tasks are entered into Rally – this happens even when we’re all in the same room. One thing that’s helped is to enter the tasks directly into Rally, as opposed to the sticky notes approach. The advantage of sticky notes is tactile – it’s helpful to have your tasks on a board for everyone to review and it’s easy to rearrange tasks, but the notes can be limiting in that it’s hard to capture details.

It seems to me that distributed agile is really an area that really could use some work. Distributed development teams are becoming quite common, but most agile processes are high-touch, high-interaction processes, which is at odds with a distributed team.

— Gordon Weakliem

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Comment

  1. We’ve been looking at and extending agile techniques for distributed workgroups for a few years now. The website URI – linked from my name – that I gave goes to our writings which have some good references by both more academic and more practical folk.

    — Joseph A. di Paolantonio · Jun 9, 03:58 PM · #

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