program selection system

Off-shoring and distributing project teams are a business driver in most organizations. As the world becomes increasingly “flat”, organizations are seeking out operational and cost efficiencies by leveraging distributed teams. These distributed teams are a common constraint on most technology projects today. A tremendous challenge exists in scaling large programs to include geographically dispersed teams and team members. To continue wide-spread adoption, Agile projects must find ways to thrive in distributed environments.

The reality is that our teams are not always colocated and many of us have to adapt. The empirical, inspect-and-adapt, approach will help us evolve toward processes that work. This session will help you accelerate this process by learning what has, and hasn’t, worked for others. Come share your distributed agile experience and tap into the collective wisdom that will be present. We are going to compile a list of the most important ingredients for success.

This session is an experience report from CampusSoft in the UK. The focus is on their experiences using Agile in a multi-site software development environment, in the UK, Romania and India. We will look at the motivations behind outsourcing their work to India and why the relationship with their partners in India led them to try using an Agile approach. We will then look at some of the approaches which were important for them to be Agile and the challenges that they faced, such as communication, working practices and culture.

This presentation explores the special considerations an agile project leader must account for when planning, initiating, and running a distributed agile project. Techniques, tools, and learnings from three project experiences are discussed.

Discussion will also include anecdotes, failures, and successes based on the presenter’s past experiences as both an onshore and offshore member of outsourced and co-sourced distributed teams in the US, India, and China.

This session is particularly useful for individuals new to or considering distributed agile projects.

Elastic Path and Luxoft present in this case study a successful distributed agile project using outsourcing (both near and offshore). Elastic Path and Luxoft are both experienced agile practitioners, which helped immensely insofar as neither had to learn how to do agile while trying to overcome the difficulties in implementing agile in a distributed manner. The case study describes how Elastic Path and Luxoft overcame the challenges of daily meetings, the lack of face-to-face interactions, rapidly changing requirements, and rapid team size scaling all across a fourteen hour time difference.

If planning for a large co-located 30+ development team is not enough to make you want to pull your hair out then try a 30+ development team located across several time zones, in places with different cultures and languages. Now, you’ve reached a level in the Agile planning game that would send most product owners running home to their mommies.

After running a similar workshop with about 20 participants on XP2007 it became clear that getting distributed agile projects right is still a challenge. We got the impression that the community has definitely started to test and execute distributed agile projects. This is obviously driven by the offshoring trend. The interesting phenomenon we are observing is that it is the quality and collaboration aspects of agile practices that leads to an interest in agile practices despite the initial belief that distributed projects would need a more structured waterfallish approach.

Agile is not only a good way to develop software but also a great way to build teams that collaborate better and respond more quickly to the changes in business environment.

This talk presents some evolved thinking backed by some research about how successful decentralized/ distributed organizations have followed agile principles to gain significant competitive advantage over traditional centralized/ heirarchical organizations.

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.