program selection system

Intent
The intent of this session is to expose participants to the challenges faced by distributed agile teams, to allow them to discover ways to mitigate those challenges, and to have fun.

Summary
The Distributed Agile Game is meant to be played by people who are interested in challenges experienced by members of distributed agile teams. The participants may have prior experience in distributed development, but this is not required. In fact, no software development experience is required.

Agility asks for face-to-face communication, trust and collaboration. Proximity can be created by travelling – at least sometimes. Virtual communication channels provide another possibility overcoming the distance. But we should take the trust threshold into account which, once hit, will break an existing relationship.

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.