Agile 2005: Distributed Agile

Interesting morning session today, (Thursday 28th July 2005), the topic is Agile in a distributed workforce, three case studies where presented, that gave insight into the way that three separate organizations are leveraging Agile in a distributed workforce.

In summary, each case study concluded that distributed Agile, with the right collaboration tools, and the correct leadership, can work, and work very successfully. A couple of tools where mentioned, Interwise and Twiki. One very clear aspect of making this work was the investment by both the client and also the service organization in each case, investments where generally centered around the following hi-level items, investments where both monetary and also time.

1. Collaborative tools, Wiki, Video Conferencing, Virtual White Boards, and Instant Messaging.

2. Convening the entire team in one physical location for up to 6 weeks at the start of a project, to build relationships and trust within the team, so that once the team breaks into separate parts there is a strong relationship between the remote team members and local resources.

3. Compromise within the team, when dealing with differences in time zones, i.e. a team is allowed to decide its own working hours to ensure the optimal interaction between the distributed team members

4. Training, to ensure that the team as a whole is at the same level of experience using the organizations Agile approach.

Each case study demonstrated improvements in the quality of the product, the speed of development, and most importantly the improvement in the quality of life of all team members.

Two of the three case studies where presented by companies that develop product, either for external consumption or for internal usage. The third was Valtech, a consulting company, which has a very large offshore offering, they are utilizing Agile in their offshore development projects so that they may better server their clients, specifically those that are starting to use Agile practices.