DISTRIBUTED SCRUM TEAM
Recipe for Success
- Sakshi Mahajan
Who am I?
■ 11+ years experience in the IT industry
■ PMI-ACP Certified
■ Currently working as an Agile Technical Coach with Capital One Bank (A Fortune 500 company) in Virginia, US
■ Wore many hats in he Agile world – Scrum master, Product Owner, Agile PM, Coach
■ Experience in coaching Scrum, Kanban as well as XP practices
Agenda
■ Scrum in Brief
■ Need for distributed teams
■ Challenges for distributed teams
■ Myths regarding scrum
■ Various Models of Distributed Scrum
■ Solution
Scrum in Brief
Need for Distributed Team
■ High quality resources
■ High business agility
■ Cost effective
Image courtesy : http://agilekata.co/
Challenges for Distributed teams
■ Language
■ Time zone
■ Cultures
■ Lack of visibility
■ Various project phases – played by people distributed across
Myth 1 of Distributed Scrum
■ Scrum methodology can only be followed in co-located teams
– Though it has been empirically proven that co-located teams can deliver faster, but scrum is not impossible in distributed teams
Myth 2 of Distributed Scrum
■ Distributed development is chaotic
http://www.maxmetrics.com/
Myth 3 of Distributed Scrum
■ Distributed development increases the amount of documentation
Various Models of Distributed Scrum
Development team co-located and Product Owner at a different location
Product Owner
Scrum Team
Development team distributed
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Team
members
Team
members
Multiple scrum teams – distributed (Scaled Scrum)
Product Owner
Scrum Team
Product Owner
Scrum Team
Solution
Do you have the Agile Mindset ?
Solution : Recipe for success
Communicate
Collaborate
Trust
Solution: Open communication channels
■ Manager/scrum master should not be a bottleneck
■ Video conference wherever possible
Image courtesy : http://blogs.atlassian.com
Solution : Team members visit the other side
■ Improves bonding
■ Increases trust
■ Helps understand each other's style of work
■ Cultural understanding
Solution: Include all in Scrum Ceremonies
■ All meet at least once a day to synch thoughts
■ Keep in mind time zone difference
■ Everyone part of sprint planning –just once in 2-3 weeks
■ Everyone showcases in demos
■ Share opinion in retrospective
http://codevanced.net
Solution : Continuous Integration
■ Frequent check-ins
■ Code review automation
■ Static code analyser
■ Automation suite integrated
■ Nightly builds
Reduces the risk of finding bugs late in lifecycle
Solution: Digital ALM tools
■ Use ALM tools like Mingle, Rally, JiRA, etc and keep them updated
■ Digital whiteboards
■ All can see backlogs, burndowns, etc
Solution: Collaboration tools
■ Different time-zones, and different locations hinders collaboration
■ Documenting on wikis very useful
– All contribute and co-own
■ Found multiple tools useful
– Mindmeister
– Google docs
– Google apps
– Trello