distributed agile

Agile Offshore: Why Distributed Demo / Showcase is so Important?

Demo is an integral and important part of Scrum ceremonies. Important because that’s the whole point of being Agile. You get early feedback from Product Owner and stakeholders and fine-tune the product if required. Also this is sometimes the only occasion for offshore team when sponsors and business actually get to see the real contribution of offshore team. There are valid reasons also when someone from onsite team gives the demo. They include:

Language problem. I worked with a French team in which stakeholders and business were more at ease to talk in French.
Completely opposite time-zones which may not allow a lot of collaboration.

The advantages of distributed demo far outweighs the ones of onsite demo.

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.

Distributed Scrum Teams: Never End a Sprint on Friday

by Avienaash Shiralige 15 Comments

Scrum team members know that things get very busy near the end of an iteration. The coding and quality activities need to be wrapped up, demo preparation occurs, the sprint review is held, the sprint retrospective is held, and the next sprint planning meeting is held.

If the onsite team team prefers to end iterations on Friday, they might naturally assume they have all day Friday until evening for these activities.

However, look at what that would do to a remote sub-team in India – it would mean working until early hours on Saturday morning. A better practice is to split the end of sprint activities across two days, ideally during the overlap time dedicated for sub-team synchronization. This insures minimal impact to normal working hours at the end of each sprint.

Distributed Scrum: A Day In The Life Of A Distributed Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

In my earlier post on “How to Address People and Communication Challenges on Distributed Scrum Teams” we discussed about importance of communication in building trust. Quality and Quantity of communication needs get amplified as soon your team gets distributed.

Distributed teams I have worked with have organized their schedule and overlapping hours some thing like below.