cultural challenges in global agile

Cultural Challenges in Global

AgileAgile

Agile India Conference 2010

Raghuram Bharathan

BACKGROUND

Playground

• Co-development

– Different time zones

– Different teams

• 2 week iterations• 2 week iterations

• Separate QA team

• Remote Product Owner

• QA inline with iteration

• Common toolset

Rules of the game

• Meetings

– Pre-planning and Planning

– Demo and Retro

– Standups– Standups

– Conference calls

• Work

– User stories

– Bugs from released stories

Players

• Customer team

– Average 10+ years experience

– Similar experience levels

• Offshore team• Offshore team

– Different experience levels - 0 to 10

– Different cultural backgrounds

– Most with no agile experience

THE CHALLENGES

Why IT industry?

Why IT industry?

• High-paying

• Opportunities

• Overseas exposure

• Glamorous• Glamorous

• Air-conditioned work, 5 day week

Education System

• Theoretical focus

– Civics and civic sense

– Learn about road rules but not follow

– System of Government

– Less importance to games and sports

• How many of us can fix a leaking tap, build a book shelf

Programming

• Focus on quantity – number of languages

• Learn through a set of programs

– Sort a list of numbers

– Binary search– Binary search

– Matrix multiplication

– Doubly linked list

Data Structure

Complexity

Programming

• Less focus on design and implementation

– Performance, scalability and reliability

– Testability

– Coding standards – Coding standards

– Best practices of programming

How it affects

• Doing it right the first time

• Test First/ Test Driven Development

• Writing clean code (free of violations)

IT/Service Mindset

• Somehow solve a problem

• Means are not important or relevant

• Deadline driven

• Quantity rather than quality• Quantity rather than quality

• Applicable for only one situation

Contrasting Product Mindset

• Hardware, OS, browser independence

• Design for change

• Logging

• Installation and deployment strategy• Installation and deployment strategy

• Upgrade strategy

• Service packs and hotfixes

How it affects

• Designing for change

• Thinking beyond specific problem

• Looking at the bigger picture

Distractions at work

• Flexible working hours

• Getting to office – traffic jams

• Breakfast and coffee breaks

• Phone calls• Phone calls

• Personal mails and social network

• Friends at work

• Hobbies and recreations – lack of

How it affects

• Sticking to estimated time

• Working to compensate for lost time

• Dependant team members and delays

• Dependant groups – QA, schedule• Dependant groups – QA, schedule

Hierarchy

• Parents at home

– School

– College

– Job– Job

– Marriage

• Teachers at school/college

• Supervisors at work

– Tell me what to do and by when

How it affects

• Commitment

• Estimation

• Ownership

• Proactiveness• Proactiveness

Resume fattening

• Number of different technologies

• Number of projects

• Jack of all arts

– Master of none?– Master of none?

• Superficial/Shallow knowledge

• Disinterest in specialization

How it affects

• Working in a time-boxed environment

– Sticking to estimates

– Overcoming technical challenges

– Writing optimized code– Writing optimized code

– Using appropriate library features

Reporting Impediments

• Cultural influence

– left hand stigma

– fear of punishment

• Self-conscious• Self-conscious

• Linking to appraisal

• Non-technical

Manager

Retrospective participation

• Cultural influence– Stoic and self-content

– Why upset the apple-cart?

• Set a goal – meet or exceed

• Why raise the barrier?

• Skirt around sensitive topics

– People, ability, aptitude

Collaboration

• Talking vs discussion

• Divide and conquer vs

independence

• Me, mine, myself vs us, ours• Me, mine, myself vs us, ours

• Blame game

• Taking feedbacks personally

Communication

• Cultural influence

– English as foreign language

– Mother tongue influence

• Trouble with accent• Trouble with accent

• What I said and what I

mean

• Verbal and written

Holidays

• Cultural influence

– Away from family

– Going home for festivals

• Multitude of festivals• Multitude of festivals

• Regional and religious

• 2 week iterations and holidays

Unlearning

• Happy with status quo

– resistance to change

• Unaware of doing

mistakesmistakes

• Difficulty in correcting

• Importance of learning

it right the first time

Tools of tradeTools of trade

Prayer Programming

Pat on the back

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

Self-driven teams

• Who should bell the cat?

• Why me?

• What is in it for me?

• Harder I work, the more • Harder I work, the more

work I get

• Peer pressure

Chief Programmer model

• Create specializations amongst team members

• Break stories into tasks

– Specialized team member picks tasks

• Less self-driven and more ability-driven• Less self-driven and more ability-driven

• Leads as Chief Programmers

– interact with customer

– coach and mentor team

Tool-driven approach

• Minimize the human factor

• Tools

– to flag style violations

– to identify lack of code coverage– to identify lack of code coverage

– to flag incorrect coding practices

– to run for each check-in and identify issues at the

earliest

– consistent across local and remote teams

• Core business hours

• Blocking of social networking at work

• Co-location – low cubicle walls

Overcoming distractions

•

• Manager co-located with team

Tracking

• Variant of Pomodoro technique – pre-lunch

and post-lunch (3 hour slots)

• Stand ups before start of work and post-lunch

• Individual follow-ups and reminders• Individual follow-ups and reminders

• Proxy updates

• Multiple channels

– Wiki, Issue tracking system, email, instant

messaging

– Regular teleconferences

Communication Channels

– Regular teleconferences

– Large whiteboard with visible status

Pigs and Chickens

• Be transparent

• Track through tools

• Try to help• Try to help

• Shield from

distraction

* of the iteration* of the iteration

Summary

• Agile is here to stay

• Brings issues to surface rapidly

• Focuses on continuous improvement

• Need to work hard to stay afloat• Need to work hard to stay afloat

• Survival of the fittest

Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam

http://maruhgar.blogspot.com

raghuram.bharathan@yahoo.com