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Updating "Patterns for Distributed Agile"

Tue, 2007-12-04 21:21 — Keith Braithwaite (producer)
keywords:
room: Conference H, M — time: Wednesday 14:00-15:30, Wednesday 16:00-17:30
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In 2005 Tim Joyce and I published collections of patterns and proto-patterns capturing the common features of every then-current description of successful distributed Agile development we could find, including our own.

In the years since then, many more teams have found their way to a successful accommodation between their desire to be Agile and their business’s need or desire not to co-locate. So, it’s time to update the patterns.

A workshop where experience is reported.

Process/Mechanics

Number and Kind of Attendees

I guess that this will work well with between six and twenty-four attendees, but maybe more.

Preferred would be attendees with practical experience of distributed Agile development (and some will be explicitly invited) , but anyone with an interest (or even who’s just interested) will be most welcome and will be able to contribute.

Elicit

  1. Practitioners who have reported successful distributed Agile work since 2005 will be canvassed and explicitly invited to the session, and/or to provide input before hand
  2. those with experience of successful distributed Agile development capture as many stories as they can about what they did
    Hard-copy of the current literature (ie, all the papers, presentations, articles that I can find) will be provided to attendees
  3. all attendees take part in an affinity exercise to find repeating solutions

Record

  1. split into groups by interest in solutions
  2. begin a writeup into pattern form
  3. if we’re very, very lucky, get to the point where one or more candidate patterns can be workshopped in the PLoP style.

If this works at all well, then the outputs will be worked up off-line into a form that can go to a PLoP for workshopping and publication

Take-home Learning for Attendees

It’s a workshop, so the main benefit is having taken part in the workshop and having gone through the process of interacting and exchanging experiences with the others in the workshop. If there has to a declared take-home of some sort, then it would be one or more (depending on the attendee) of:

  • learning new techniques for distributed agile
  • learning new approaches to implementing techniques already in use
  • learning what worked, and what didn’t for others, and so what might or might not work for you, um
  • now struggling to capture an opportunity for experiential growth as a practitioner in the form of bullet points…
  • let’s see now, networking opportunities with other people doing distributed projects?
  • er…
  • that’s it.