Agile Offshore

Why “Definition of Ready” is Mandatory in Distributed Agile?

In one of our earlier posts I discussed the elements and benefits of “Definition of Ready”. However it’s quite common to see totally opposite views of purists as they believe that Definition of Ready is not required at all.

I agree to their views to some extent if it’s all about collocated teams supported by dedicated product owner in the same time zone.

However, distributed Agile is a different beast altogether. It’s quite common in India to work with customers in opposite time-zones. Distributed communication essentially is an overhead. So the clarification which you receive in minutes face-to-face with collocated product-owner may require multiple iterations of distributed communication. Multiple iterations essentially mean multiple days.

So a READY user-story which could be finished in 2 hours now takes days to complete because of to and fro communication between distributed team-members to resolve unresolved queries.

Definition of Ready in such cases helps in bringing clarity and in keeping team members and product owner on the same page. Any absence of clarity essentially complicates the cycle time and throughput of a sprint.

More on Backlog Refinement, Story Points and Agile Estimation

This post is a part of a blog post series on story points and agile estimation. To read rest of the posts on the subject, please navigate to All About Story Points and Agile Estimation Series.

Agile Offshore : Business Analyst – Complementing the Role of Product Owner

by ShriKant Vashishtha 2 Comments

Let’s take a scenario.

You have a product owner at distributed location but somehow he is not able to provide sufficient time to distributed team. Because of that team doesn’t get enough understanding of user-story.

Does it sound familiar?

Mostly it’s about PO getting involved in too many other things. That results in not having user-stories READY, analysed or communicated properly.

That brings another question related to suitability of people assigned for PO role. Not everybody is good in analysing and writing good user-stories.
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Agile Offshore: Create Effective and Decisive Product Owner Proxy to Offshore Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 6 Comments

Off-shoring in current market is a global economic and strategic need. Building Agile Offshore teams across boundaries and time zones is a different ball game. It has its fair share of challenges to work with. I shared few of those challenges and a possible approach to take in my earlier articles.

1. How to Address People and Communication Challenges
2.Distributed Agile:10 Best Practices of Successful Teams
3. Distributed Scrum: A Day In The Life Of A Distributed Team

You need to make few changes along your way to your normal routine to make it work. One challenge I often see is integration of offshore team with onshore team and to project/business vision.