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

THANKS!!Sakshi.fialoke@gmail.com