InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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MS Experience Yields Distributed Agile "Dos and Don'ts"
Ade Miller has published a paper on distributed agile development, highlighting the challenges of trying to do distributed agile development, along with recommendations for addressing these challenges based primarily on the experiences of teams within the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft.
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Presentation: Planning with a Large Distributed Team
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Wes Williams and Mike Stout share their recent experience with a large distributed team, the planning hurdles they encountered and how they passed them, and their recommendation: avoid large distributed teams.
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Card Game Teaches Distributed Project Communication Lessons
Charles Suscheck presented how he uses a variation of the card game Rummy to teach the importance of communication, planning, and collaboration on projects at Agile2008. The game explores the effects of various levels of distribution on a team, as well as the impact of adding or removing experts on the team during a project.
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Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence - A New SEI Paper
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) recently published a paper entitled "Evaluating and Improving Architectural Competence", which looks at using four models of human behaviour to help assess and improve software architecture competence.
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Ideal Architecture is not always about Ideal Technology or Techniques
The ideal architecture is not always the one based on choices that technically would be the best. It should indeed take into account requirements of different stakeholders, which may limit the scope of choice. Phillip Calçado argues that the development team counts among these stakeholders and that constraints resulting from development environment cannot be ignored by the architect.
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Target Process 2.7: Agile Project Management tool for Distributed Teams
Target Process 2.7 has been released. Target Process is an Agile Process Management tool that automates many of the tasks associated with an agile project. Notable features in recent iterations include visual iteration planning, program level release planning, individual velocity reports, and more.
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Teleconferencing: How To Keep 'Em Engaged
While Agile processes recommend to colocate team members for synergy, it's not always possible. More and more projects are utilizing talent from locations all over the world to solve various problems. In these cases leaders and facilitators can contribute significantly to teamwork by mastering the ability to run effective remote meetings.
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Presentation: Implementing Scrum In A Distributed Software Development Organization
At Agile2007 we heard the tale of a distributed Scrum project with 50 people in 4 continents. BMC Identity Management decided to build their next generation product, including architectural changes and component integration, using Scrum to handle the uncertainty of their product's requirements. This presentation talks about how.
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Has Agile Crossed the Chasm?
Carrying on from last year's survey, Scott Ambler published the 2007 Agile Adoption survey this month. InfoQ provides some analysis of his findings and asks readers how they would approach getting a single view of Agile trends from across the community.
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Can Virtual Teams Ever Work?
Co-location is one of the cornerstones of Scrum, so the increasing trend toward non-co-located teams raises questions on how Agile can work in such an environment. David Churchville has blogged some common distributed team scenarios, and offered solutions to common pitfalls of delivering Agile projects using different types of distributed teams.
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Offshore Outsourcing with Scrum
Swedish consulting firm Softhouse recently published the second part of an interview with Jeff Sutherland, in which he describes how one company used Scrum to integrate with an offshore development team.
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Practitioners Adapt Agile to Local Constraints
Some people think they can only be Agile with small, co-located teams and full management support, but most teams aren't that lucky. So, should they should give up on Agile techniques? Scott Ambler's answer is a resounding "No!" His Dr. Dobbs article "Imperfectly Agile: You Too Can Be Agile!" outlines how Agilists overcome common challenges that others use as excuses for not being Agile.
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Put People First in Agile Distributed Testing
Baiju Joseph's new article on StickyMinds argues that, in order to build an effective testing team for distributed Agile, we need to focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Based on the author's experience in setting up distributed agile testing teams, he lists numerous criteria that must be met in order to reach this goal.
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SirsiDynix Case Study: Jeff Sutherland on Highly Productive Distributed Scrum
Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland has just finished a paper on the SirsiDynix project, which he calls the most productive large Java project ever documented. The project used Distributed Scrum and some XP practices. Although distributed teams are often expected to experience reduced productivity, this team's productivity level matched that measured by Cohn on a co-located team!
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Distributed Teams Can be Effective...Enough
Scrum, being an Agile approach to teamwork, emphasises team co-location. So why is Esther Derby, ScrumMaster, writing about distributed teams? They pose real communication challenges, but are a reality in many organisations adopting Agile, and Esther notes "you can't just hope that communication will work." In this article, she offers Five Tactics to Compensate for Distance on Distributed Teams.