Distributed Scrum

Agile Offshore: Create Effective and Decisive Product Owner Proxy to Offshore Team

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.

Distributed Agile: How to Address People and Communication Challenges

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

The main challenges of Distributed Agile revolve around People, Information sharing / Communication, and Project Structure.

Let’s talk about first 2 challenges and how to address them. I wrote an article couple of weeks before on “10 Best Practices of Distributed Agile“. You will find few more practices in that article to address below concerns.

People

[pullquote]Effective, honest communication and trust is the foundation of all Agile teams. Most productive development teams thrive in an environment of trust.[/pullquote]

Half or more of your development team is distributed across continents. How do you create that all important environment of trust and alignment to common vision when your team is distributed?

Your development team (onshore + offshore) now consists of engineers whose primary language is not English, or at least sounds different than your version of English. It adds another complexity to communication.

Cultural, tone and body language differences will compound the challenge. Multi-shore Agile requires changes to the norm. The best environment is when all developers (local and remote) feel part of the larger team and make decisions for the benefit of the single team. But how do you do this?

Distributed Agile:10 Good Practices of Successful Teams

by Avienaash Shiralige 8 Comments

10 good Practices of Distributed Agile Teams

Distributed agile teams can exist in different forms like.

Product Owner is onshore, Team is offshore
Team split between two or more locations
A complex model like product owner not with onshore team and development team distributed across time zones

I would like to share top 10 good practices that are implemented by successful distributed agile teams.