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Agile with Distributed Teams

and Dependencies

By: Nirmaljeet Malhotra Agile Coach

©2008 Improving Enterprises, Inc.

Intro

Distributed family

15 years in IT

7+ years in Agile

Twitter: #mnirmaljeet

www.nirmaljeet.com

Agile coach and

trainer

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Wanna be Agile?

Distributed

Teams

Dependencies

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Scrum by the book…

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Why distribute?

Agile hyper productivity and quality

combined with offshore benefits:

Availability of talent

Scale up and down

Cost reduction

Round the clock support

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What are distributed teams?

Not at the same place

Different

Floor

Office

City

Country

Continent

Time-zone

Offshore, near shore, not sure..

Courtesy: Keith Richards

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Distributed ways

Courtesy: Jeff Sutherland

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Survey 1

In one word, share your number 1 problem

with distributed teams across

countries/continents

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Survey 2

In one word, share your number 1 problem

with distributed teams in the same

building/floor

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Question?

So where is the problem?

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Agile Manifesto

http://agilemanifesto.org/

Individuals

Interactions

Processes

Tools

Working

Software

Comprehensive

Documentation

Customer

Collaboration

Contract

Negotiation

Responding to

Change

Following a

Plan

Distributed Teams

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Distributed teams | Key issues

Communication tax

Accessibility

Information lost in translation

Language and cultural differences

Motivation drop

Cost

Compromise on personal time

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“Project costs increase in proportion to the

time it takes for people to understand each

other” - Alistair Cockburn

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Key success attributes

Focused team work Collaboration

Trust Cultural Sensitivity

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Communication Face to face

Use WebEx, Skype etc… whatever it takes

Phone and IM is better than documents and mails

Go visual

Travel - create a bond

Collaboration Digital scrum boards / dash boards

Wiki

Avoid/reduce emails

Share the pain

Communication and Collaboration

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Development and Tracking Tools

Where is the code and how do we

manage it?

How much TDD and CI?

What other tools are we using to:

Manage requirements

Manage project

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What’s important..

What is the vision?

Don’t allow tools to drive the process

Leverage creativity

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Agile

Feature teams

Story mapping

Release planning

Backlog grooming

Scrum of Scrums

Same scrum rules apply Courtesy: agilenorth.org

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Distributed setup

Role distribution

Balance of power

Distribution in vertical

slices

Affinity based feature

ownership

One team

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Before you scale

Run scrum successfully locally

Elevate quality through XP practices

Stop thrashing, focus people

Scale

Introduction to agile and scaling at the same time can be a challenge

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Inspect and adapt

Hone the process, a tiny bit each time

Find the root cause

Retrospect

Keep it simple

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Best practices for distributed Agile

People Process Tools

Open seating Daily stand up Wiki

Team building Scrum of Scrums Star phones

Vision Retrospectives Smart boards

Cross pollination Remote pairing PLM tool

Tracking and metrics Build pipeline

Example:

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Manage distance

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Dependencies

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Where do dependencies come from?

End user driven

Requirements decomposition

driven

Component driven

Technology driven

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Dependency | Key issues

Conflicting priorities Team A dependent on Team B

Team A makes a change causing work for Team B (Architectural refactoring)

Dynamic scope Changing priorities each sprint

Cycle time

Higher cost

Communication and process overhead

Perception

Integration

Tough to predict / anticipate

Courtesy: gfi.com

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Option 1 | Feature Teams

Feature teams

Allow teams to deliver end to end feature

Searc

h

Bro

wse

Checkout

Pay

Team A

Vision

Autonomy

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Options 2 – Open Source Model

Internal open source model

Team 1 Team 2

Reduced wait time

Collective ownership

Build knowledge

Understand challenges

Evolve Design guidelines

Code standards

People

Build trust

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Option 3 – Dependency planning

Identify and plan for dependencies

User story mapping

Release planning Usage

Criticality

Re

lea

se

1.0

R

ele

as

e 1

.1

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Option 3 – Dependency planning 2

Involve all POs

Cross team collaboration

Scrum of Scrums

Mock

Definition of Done

Inspect and adapt

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Communities

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Finally

Having right structure and tools is important

But…

How you practice Agile values is critical

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©2008 Improving Enterprises, Inc.

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